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New Website - progress report

In which I report to the membership the progress of setting up the new website.

Seeing as I've been talking this thing up for months now with little or nothing to show for it, I thought I'd provide more-or-less irregular updates on the progress of setting up the new website.

The following functions are working perfectly:

  • Online membership form. You can fill out your membership form online, with an easy Captcha to ensure it's legit, and it will automatically email your membership request to the Secretary. Right now, you also need to provide your membership fee receipt number to prove you are a financial member of the club. Only financial members will have the right to create content on the site.
  • Members-only section. Only financial members will be able to access the contact list and certain other members-only information. Members can opt out of having their contact details provided on this list if they wish.
  • Marketplace. Members can upload classified ads for things they want to sell, including price and up to two photos of the item.
  • Photo uploads. This was always a flaw of the old site - you could only ever upload photos one at a time. The new site features multiple simultaneous uploads.
  • Start page for members. This is like a 'landing pad' with clear links to important information, and simple instructions for creating events, news, blog posts and articles.
  • Wysiwyg editing for content (What You See Is What You Get). The site comes with a full set of formatting tools so that you don't need to learn any of the weird markup that the old site required. You can format text just like you can in MS Word. Almost.

The following functions still need some work:

  • Stormcry. Automating Stormcry (the AAF's monthly newsletter) was always something I had big plans for. I'm... er, still working on it. There are one or two issues I still need to resolve before this is working the way I want it to.
  • Look and Feel. As I've mentioned to some people, I'm arranging for a commercial design studio to create a professional look and feel for the website. I do want a minimum of content up before I officially engage them.
  • Online payment. I still need to do some research on getting PayPal (or similar) working. Once this is set up, membership fees and event registration can be entirely online.

Right now I'm concentrating on migrating the photo galleries. Once the galleries are uploaded, there will be a library of images that I can use to illustrate the various pages of the site. However, there is a slight problem with this. We have no way of automatically migrating the galleries.

At first the photo galleries were a very popular place for members to create content, and we got a lot of great photos. After a while though, the fact that members could only upload photos one at a time tended to discourage people from using it. As a result, new uploads stopped in around 2009. At around that time, we (our friendly Sysadmin and I) tried to install a plugin to the website that did multiple photo uploads, but it failed bigtime, leaving nasty footprints all over the database. Because of this, it was impossible to cleanly upgrade to the new version of the software. So basically we created a brand new blank website, so that we could manually copy the relevant content from the old site.

However, this is quite a tedious process. In the case of the photo galleries, each individual photo needs to be manually downloaded - one photo at a time. I am accepting assistance with this process, if anyone's interested. At this time, the Feasts, Archery, Ancient History and some of the Kit Photos have been uploaded. More will be coming.

The good news is that the new multiple-upload plugin works perfectly. Once all of the photos have been downloaded from the old site, it is really easy to upload them all to the new site. Also, new galleries can be easily created, and you can upload entire folders at once. Hopefully, this will reinvigorate this section of the site and we'll see people putting new galleries up.
What's next?

After the photo galleries, I will be working on the Displays and Beorg-wic pages. Then I'll be migrating the Fighting, Craft and Archery pages. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's actually rather a lot of information on the old site. It will take me some time to bring across.

I'll post another update sometime soon - when I have something new to report.

--
Andrew Gould
Website Editor
editor@aaf.org.au
http://aaf.org.au/

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