Since being founded in 1996, Mars Hill has placed a high value on engaging the culture around us with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Just as the Apostle Paul and others used letters to communicate to Christians scattered around the ancient world, we see the use of modern day technologies as a continuation of the Gospel reaching the ends of the earth.
The primary challenge for our the latest version of the site developed in 2008 was to develop a media-centric and scalable distribution platform. We examined off-the-shelf content management systems (CMS), but none of them met our specific needs at the time and none could be easily scaled for our future needs. As a result, we chose to develop one that could potentially meet our requirements, well aware of our current staffs abilities.
It took about nine months to build out a custom platform on Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Apache to handle the main media upload and presentation on marshill.com. To present video content on the new platform, we also created our custom Flash player, which was done using ActionScript 3.0 and has evolved over the life of the project to include streaming and integrated audio playback as well.
As site traffic has grown rapidly, our Seattle-based hosting company Tier3 has continued to manage it well. We are also investing in content distribution network (CDN) technology to help improve the speed and reliability of our content worldwide. We have used Internap, Amazon CoudFront, and Limelight for these needs at various times.
No, we are not in the position right now to give away our website or video technology. However, much of the technology we use is open source and is available for anyone to use. These technologies include:
This site is its own custom built CMS specific for Mars Hill, but in the past we have used some open source options.
Unfortunately we can’t give away the video player used for Mars Hill because it was custom built for our site. However we recommend the video players below.
1996 – Static HTML
Like many others we started with the basics but early on realized this was our front door for many in Seattle as the first place they would look to learn more about Mars Hill. As such effort was put specifically into the design reflecting our core focus at the time of meaning, beauty, truth, and community.
1998 – Static HTML with a PHPBB forum
Volunteers wanted content that brought people back to the site and created an open forum on the site to debate doctrine and theology with everyone and anyone.
2004 – Custom Flash application
Our custom flash player was developed by volunteers and a local firm called Crash Shop. It won many awards for its innovative approach to delivering downloadable media.
2007 – ASP .NET and Flash
With the addition of video to the site, we needed to expand how we were able to administrate and display an ever-growing library of content.
2008 – Ruby on Rails
We began to outgrow our existing technologies and in August of 2008 launched an all new Rails application for hosting the main media. We also built and sold the OnTheCity platform, our best solution for organizing and connecting community in our church.
2009 – CDN and Streaming
In August we started streaming video using a custom built Flash player and Internap streaming services from Tier3. Internap provides some low level services at a reasonable price. Other providers of this kind of service are Ooyala, The Platform, Wowza, and Akamai
As I am sure you know, at Mars Hill Church we make a concerted effort to give a lot of content away for free. From sermon video and audio, training, community group questions to transcripts and free ebooks. It is a core belief of Mars Hill to give content away for free in an effort to genuinely win influence for Christ. When it comes to technology, when we engage in open source projects we also work to supply back to those projects code that we can help the community with and take part in growing those projects when we can. In the case of application development such as our iphone app or flash player object where we are specifically spending additional staffing time, money, and effort including volunteer time to package and deliver that free content in an effort to give even more away, we retain those properties as unique organizational tools.The reality, as well, is that this application is built very specifically to the custom platform we use for our web distribution making it practically unusable for simple re-purposing.
Tier3 – Provides virtualized web hosting services.
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