ScriptureLog.com Flooding the Internet with the Book of Mormon … and the other scriptures too

About

Open Source Collaborative Scripture Study

The Internet has really lead to a revolution in collaborative discussion and learning.  Electronic bulletin  boards, email lists, forums, social networks, user generated media, and blogs have allowed people to communicate and share ideas in ways that were never previously imaginable.  Free and Open Source software and Open Web Standards have played a major role in facilitating these communications.

ScriptureLog is an Open Source plugin for the popular WordPress blogging platform that allows you to take advantage of Open Source technologies and standards by turning WordPress into a platform for collaborative scripture study.

ScriptureLog installs volumes of scripture into WordPress as hierarchical, inter-linking pages of books, chapters, and verses.  Once the pages are installed, you can use the built-in features of WordPress to collaborate with friends or family, a seminary or institute class, or members of your congregation or mission, to coordinate scripture reading, take notes, and discuss the gospel.

Available Scriptures

At the moment only The Book of Mormon and the Old Testament are available, but as the project progresses we will be adding all of the LDS Standard Works.

The Book of Mormon has been organized in a way to help readers better recognize the structure of the text as they are reading and indicates the original 1830 chapter organization of the book in addition to the modern chapter divisions as well as helpful textual hints at the top of each page.  The Old Testament has also been organized to help users identify various traditional divisions in the text as well as shifts in theme, narrative, or focus. And every page contains a link to the same section of the scriptures on the official LDS church's website.

How it Works

Websites built on WordPress have two types of content: Posts and Pages.  Posts are listed in reverse chronological order in your blog.  Pages, on the other hand, contain additional information and are often displayed as links across the top of the website or in the sidebar.  The ScriptureLog Plugin inserts thousands upon thousands of inter-linking pages directly into the database that WordPress uses, and then modifies the default behavior of WordPress to exclude these pages from its normal list of pages and instead present them in a custom sidebar widget.

The blog can still be used to make announcements or describe a course of study, and pages can still be created for other information.  You can customize your scripture study appearance using standard WordPress themes and other Plugins.  Some themes display comments only on Posts and not on Pages, so you may have to tweak some themes to make the comments show up on the scripture pages.

There are existing plugins that allow you to require users to sign up for accounts before they can participate, and plugins to make your site private so that you can carry on scripture study privately with only a select group.

Appropriate Hosting

Because the plugin inserts thousands of pages, ScriptureLog is not suitable for sites hosted on WordPress.com, which limits the number of pages an individual account can have.  It is also not recommended for established blogs with a large number of existing posts.   It would be best used on a fresh, Self-Hosted install of WordPress.

Acknowledgments

ScriptureLog is derived from the excellent SQL files of the LDS Scriptures made available by Steve Dibb at his Mormon Documentation Project.

The Authors

Scripturelog was created by Daniel Bartholomew and J. Max Wilson.  Both have been involved with LDS Blogging for many years.  They met each other through their interactions online and have met in person a few times.  Daniel lives in New York City with his wife and daughter and J. Max lives in Orem Utah with his wife and three children.