Post by Robert Ballantyne. Contact me if you have any questions.

This blog post is fairly technical, and is here, listed under the category of Site Development, as a reference for future users of this site.

This past weekend, the new Rotary theme that was issued broke the site, and there was about an hour when the site was down until we could restore the old theme. Since then, a further version of the theme has been issued and implemented.

The integration with DACdb for the membership list is still not working. We have learned that it may never work reliably. The webmaster is now thinking that the information that he is trying to obtain for that membership page will probably work better if the site obtains the data directly from Rotary itself. As we understand it, it won’t make any difference to the user. That membership page will be populated with the same information. As soon as a change is made to DACdb, the data are percolated immediately to Rotary.

BowenRotary.com and MountGardner.com are slow to load today. I spoke to the web hosting company (both domains are at the same account). It seems that their server is under attack by a hacker. The company seems not concerned about security, and they say the attack will soon come to an end. Odd.

The new version of the site has a new menu structure called Mega Menu, which displays a large block of sub menus, and then has room for sub-sub-menus. That may be great for a much bigger club, but we prefer the old pulldown menus. It turns out that this is an option in the menu section of the Back End of the site. We’ve changed the menu back to the ‘Flyout Menu.’

With the new theme version, we have lost the footer widgets on the Home Page… so there is more remedial work to be done.

The theme webmaster seems a little disappointed that we are not using the facilities for committees and projects. On our site, the ‘Projects’ are merely WordPress Pages at the site. He noticed that we did have a couple of projects entered, but they are not on the menus. I said that when our Projects Director entered the project information she filed the information in ‘Projects’ and not in Pages. The WordPress back end facilities for Pages and Projects look similar. I simply cut and pasted the material over to Pages. If you’d like to see how a real Project page would look, here it is: http://bowenrotary.com/?p=808. I won’t guarantee that that link will remain far into the future. So, that Projects page is there, but we’ve not made it available on the menus.

At some point we may see the advantage of using committees and projects that are built into this site. A lot of thought and effort has gone into those features — but I think we’d have to be a bigger club to make use of them. I learned that with this web site structure, a committee can have more than one project. A project does not have to have a committee (as I had once thought). All of this took a surprisingly long time to sort out today and over the weekend.