Good progress on the site today. Much of this afternoon was lost trying to figure out how to have the top-level navigation buttons merely show the child pages and not leap to its own page if someone accidentally clicked on it. While, in the past, menu buttons existed because they were the name of a page, it is possible to make menu buttons from links. See the previous article for the full remedy.

This morning Denis and I worked on the site using screen sharing. For a while we were honoured to have online with us, Paul O., the webmaster for this amazing theme we are using. In a short time, he sorted out some of the major problems we were experiencing.

Here is what we accomplished today.

1. Our membership page was not working. It was unable to pull data from DACdb and recognize our members on this site. Paul noticed that Denis and I were admins on the site, but we were not  using the information from DACdb. The solution was to delete our admin accounts on this WordPress site. Without us in there, DACdb was able to provide Subscriber accounts to all of our club members at this WordPress site. For a few moments, Denis and I were very limited until our new accounts here were promoted to administrators.
2. Paul noted that there was something odd and incorrect about our menu structure. That’s my doing. I had created the menus using the old WordPress system of numbering the order of the pages, and then identifying which were parents and which were children pages. The newer system has the option of creating whole systems of menus under Appearance. So, we had to remake our menus from scratch. This process both simplified and improved the menu structure. We discovered that the reason that we could not make the speakers’ page include built-in tabs for Upcoming Speakers and Speaker Archive (as we had observed at the BBRC site) was that feature has been abandoned in the current version of the BBRC theme. Paul noticed that our logo uses a yellow Rotary wheel with the blue fill, and that is not consistent with the new Rotary International design requirements. Since we use the logo in many of our materials, we’ll likely retain our old design.
3. Paul mentioned that the field for the copy that appears in Meeting Site Address could use HTML. Later, I was able to add a link to a Google Map of the location of Collins Hall. I could adjust the scale so all the local roads are clear, but so is the route from the Ferry Berth and Snug Cove.
4. After Paul left us we went to some length to re-think the menu structure and made lots of structural changes. The link to DACdb has been improved, but there may be more to do.
5. The page that appears when someone clicks on Become a Member — Get more info has been modified. I added some place-holder copy, and I used the template for the Home page so it would have the slider.
6. See the previous article for the resolution of the problem of parent menu items having blank pages.
7. Back in the evening to make a number of other changes. First, the theme needed to be updated from v3.313 to 3.315. This resulted in the loss of some site features that then needed fixing, as described in this post: http://bowenrotary.com/2015/05/update-rotary-theme/
8. Since, as the previous post reported, we’d figured out how to have Static Menu Items, I reworked the parent menu tabs so they are now all static unless there are no drop-down child pages.
9. As part of rationalizing (removing) the parent pages, I created a few new pages to fill in the blanks. About Bowen Rotary has the copy from the old parent that was About Us.
10. Contact Us uses one of many possible dynamic lists from DACdb. The page heading shows as Bowen Island Board Members, and presents a matrix of 9 cells, one for each board member. The generic cell shows the board member’s name and title. If the member chooses (at DACdb) it can also present a small portrait and phone number. Although it does not display the email address, if the viewer clicks on the board member’s name an email form appears where someone can write to the member. I think it looks friendly.
11. Projects and Speakers / Events, are now Static Menu Items.
12. I moved and renamed the Member Directory to the last item. It is for member’s only.
13. Since the menubar has its own Search field, I removed the Search widget from the home-page widget stack.
14. Now the only item in the home-page widget list are the recent blog items (News & Updates). I renamed that list, Recent News, and increased the length of that list from 3 items to 10. It also shows the date of each news item. So far, except for the Shelterbox post, this blog is all about the site development. Eventually, I hope, this will become populated with lots of short (or long) newsy articles about everything our members are doing and any other items of interest.

Most of the structure of the site is complete. In the days and weeks ahead there is lots of work required to fully describe and illustrate the projects and events of this club along with anything we’d like to say about the history and philosophy of the club and of Rotary in general. Since we’ve had some wonderful speakers, it would be useful if we could fill in our history with a description of those talks.