Since I haven’t got anything pretty to show you on the WordPress site yet, I figure I’ll tell you a little bit about the plans for now. If you want to interact with these plans, feel free to post your comments.

First of all, I haven’t styled any of the stuff on the WordPress site yet because I’m going to develop a theme based off of the current Lochmere site. For one thing this will make any changes less jarring for people, and for another I already know where everything goes in that theme. However, I need to make sure I don’t break any of the WordPress functionality while doing it.

News

This page will probably be renamed as News. I’m debating whether to have it be the first page or have the current Welcome page be the first page. Officers and “Guild Leaders”—for lack of a better term—will be given Author access so they can post to the News page or to their own pages (for those that request them). The News page will be primarily for important announcements, like “No Fighting Practice tonight.” This, along with the RSS features of WordPress will allow information to go out to the people who care faster than the List (*hiss*) can deliver it to them.

Officer Pages

I am interested in giving dynamic blog pages to any officer who wants one. I figure it would be in the MoAS’ interest to have a page where she can post Arts & Sciences related information and such, or the B&B’s interests to post thanks after events or progresses, etc.

Those are currently the plans for the dynamic pages. We have a lot of static page needs, since the current site is almost all static pages dynamically presented. I’ll give the Chronicler access to The Dredgings page since that’ll cut out the middle man (me) for uploading The Dredgings.

Calendar

The Calendar I’m hoping either to replace with a WordPress plugin calendar (I’ve found one but it’s useless for recurring events) or figure out a way to combine the Single Sign On currently used to link WordPress and the Forums with the sign on for the calendar. Even then I’ll need some measure of quality control so only certain people can make changes to the Public Domain calendar.

Non-WordPress-related Changes

The following current pages will stay mostly the way that they are: Activies (and its subpages), Officers (with some tweaking), OP (with some major tweaking) Neighbors, Awards (and its subpages) and the Links page. These pages don’t have a great deal of need for dynamic content—at least not user-generated dynamic content—so they don’t have a great deal of need for change from present.

Some of you have already seen my plans for the Officers page at the Officers2 page. I’ve also explained my plans to some of you with regards to the OP. While these are not WordPress-Related changes, they will be easier to implement in the WordPress installation than in the current installation. In WordPress, I can create a template for people’s persona cards and then just fill in regular fields for each page of a persona card. In the current setup, I’d have to do the stuff the WordPress WYSIWYG does manually.

Conclusion

So those are my plans for now. I’ll provide greater elucidation going forward, but I wanted to give you, my test subjects, an idea of the future while there’s still nothing to see here. The one question I do need to ask though is: should I do it? Much of this functionality is enhanced functionality over what the List (*hiss*) can provide. But because people are so used to the List (*hiss*) they may not use it. Should I still strive to make the Lochmere website the best website in the Knowne World when only the Society and Kingdom Webministers will appreciate it?