My last set of “next goals” were:
* connect it in with Git, Github Actions, and github pages
* Pull in a collection of markdown items (ala sermon descriptions, correlated with YouTube links)
* Netlify CMS to edit markdown items, commit them into the repository, and then see the flow-through of GitHub actions -> gh-pages branch

All of the above I accomplished a few days ago, though nothing looks visually appealing. I’ve also added a navigation bar, setup navigation in between the sermon descriptions, and demonstrated that our tithe button will work so long as we’re still hosted via harundalepc.org, which we will be.

Next step: a Contact Us form. We have a very simple behavior today: there’s a form with 4 fields on it, and the backend system sends an email to the church office with the information. For a static site, though, there’s no “backend system”.

This is a known problem for static sites, and there are several options out there offering to solve the problem. Because I think our ‘Contact Us’ form gets used very minimally, I’m opting to not pay a monthly fee to any such service, though, and am instead working to get an AWS Lambda function working. At the moment, I’ve worked my way out from: I can send a test email from AWS SES (last night), and now I can use an AWS Lambda function to send email given a presumed payload. Note that these things were all new to me, and I’ve gotten the barest bone versions of them working. Now to wire up an “API Gateway” such that I’ve got a web endpoint I can trigger from our static site to then hit the Lambda function.

That _should_ be the major elements and challenges I needed to knock out on the site before being able to “just” focus on styling and putting it up somewhere for review. Getting there!