Acknowledgments

This website could not have been presented to you without the enthusiastic approval of Frs. Greg Konerman and Larry Gearhart. It is in its current form in large part due to the suggestions and comments of many people, most notably Sally Kyte, Sue Jenkins and Nick Marino.

One of the special features of this website is the series of media presentations on the Catholic faith (which you will find via the "Being Catholic" menu on the right). The material was all gathered by Nick Marino for a Champaign Catholic blog at champaigncatholic.com, which he set up at the encouragement of Sue Jenkins and Sally Kyte when our first Champaign Catholic website began to crumble before our very eyes.

Of course, on the technical side, this website's features could not have existed in their current form apart from the march of technological progress. Although some people claim that former Vice President Al Gore invented the Internet, others trace the history of its development to many brilliant contributions that came when the Veep was a mere child. (See the excellent historical review on the Wikipedia page on the Internet.) And, just in case you didn't know, what we usually think of as the Internet is actually something called the World Wide Web, a separate layer of technology built atop the Internet. Finally, this particular website was built using software developed by a huge project on the web (known as Drupal), which is an example of a relatively new type of web infrastructure known as a web content management system. Such systems, and Drupal is no exception, are evolving in their form toward a layered design built atop a web application framework, like Zope, Django, Ruby-on-Rails, Java Web Start and Microsoft's proprietary .NET Framework. (Diana Dupuis, in "Drupal Is a Framework: Why Everyone Needs to Understand This", calls Drupal a content management framework – as opposed to a content management system – to highlight the fact that it's an abstraction layer filled out by "plugins" like the most recent web browsers, media players, etc.) In short, thousands of people have made contributions that make this website possible, and that's without even going into the hardware end of things!

Last, but not least, one of our talented area artists, Lisa Brandel, has been lending her assistance to upgrading the site's visual presentation. Many thanks, Lisa!