Announcing Website Version: Huge Success!

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I guess technically it’s v. 4.0 if I’m being consistent. But those posts about Website 3.5 and such are from way back in 2009….

Anyway, announcing Website Version: Huge Success!

What’s new:

  • Forum Users now have access to additional features on the rest of the site through the power of WordPress.
    • Regular users will have access to the website as Subscribers, which will allow them to post comments on Officer or Guild/Activity Leader news posts.
    • Interested individuals can be given Contributor status so they can upload files and make posts to the news such as A&S articles.
    • Officers and Guild or Activity leaders will have access as Authors so they can make news posts without having to wait for moderation and upload files to the website.
    • Officers and Guild or Activity leaders will also be able to make posts to the Calendar.
    • All users have the ability to edit their profiles on the main site to display their SCA names when posting news posts or comments.
  • I’ve managed to track down the pockets of air in the forums to shrink it back down to its normal, more aesthetically pleasing size. At least, in my opinion. I also talked some sense into the font colors and made the links behave some.
  • The entire site has been redesigned from over 50 static pages to a dynamic structure utilizing only 9 files (at least, 9 files that I have to edit at any time).
  • All pages on the previous Lochmere site have been converted to the new format and migrated over.
  • Our News page is now dynamic and easy to post to for Authors and Contributors. Links to the latest five news posts show up at the top of the sidebar.
  • News posts can be easily sorted into various Categories by Authors and Contributors to make similar topics easy to access.
  • We have a new calendar program. In some regards it isn’t as feature-rich as the previous calendar (WebCalendar), but it has the advantages of being editable by Authors, and already integrated into the site’s configuration.
  • We have a search function, albeit one that is currently driving me nuts. But it’s there!
  • None of the functionality of the previous version of the sight has been lost in the upgrade.
  • One Sign On to Rule Them All!

So that’s the quick glimpse. I’m working on a resource document (i.e. quick guide for people who are still new to this technology thing) that I’ll be uploading to the site once it’s done and approved by the Boss Lady.

Note: At present you must log-in to the Forums first before your Username will populate over to the rest of the site. This is a limitation of mixing technologies, sadly. Technically, if you created your account on the WordPress side of the site, the procedure would be the opposite, but I don’t allow auto-registration on the WordPress side so it’s not a problem.

Officers and Guild/Activity leaders should send me an e-mail after their first log-in and use of the site so I can grant them Author status. Everyone automatically populates over as Subscribers to start with. It’s a bit of a pain, but it should only be such for the startup phase where everyone’s doing there first log-ins. I don’t anticipate that taking much more than 15 years.

Enjoy the site, look around, and let me know if anything’s broken.

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