12/15/16 One step at a time
Thought I should provide an update on this huge effort...
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I've been somewhat "distracted by life" with the goings-on of the wildfires in East Tennessee, but I've been able to devote some time to this ongoing task, in addition to "housekeeping" kinds of tasks, responding to emails, messages from the site, etc. It seems that the initial flurry of members getting signed on here for the first time is over, and most can now get onto the site.
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The dues payment processing seems to be working pretty well, though it is more complex than the old site -- which has generated a few emails/messages. There have been two separate reports of errors from Apple devices when they tried to process the credit card payment. I reported this to IPS, and they couldn't determine what happened based on the server logs here, so they installed more error-tracking code to try trapping the error should it happen again.
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I've performed an update to the core software that included adding the Leaderboard function (in addition to updating the underlying PHP language to a newer version, which sped things up a bit), and updated to the latest version of the theme that we are using. I'm still waiting on the latest release of the Classifieds application. It was scheduled for release on 12/5, but he didn't make that date due to bug fixes from "beta testers." Since I'm not running a duplicate test site with this software, I don't do "beta testing" because of the potential problems. I let others be the "guinea pigs" and wait to see how their efforts go. For example, I waited on installing the latest release of the core software, v4.1.17 for a few days. By the time I installed it, they'd implemented fixes to the immediate problems discovered by others, and I installed v4.1.17.1 which corrected those issues.
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I've tested and implemented the advertising functions for the site. Sponsors ads are being rotated everywhere, while Google Adsense ads are being shown only to Guests or Registered Users. If you're a dues-paying Club Member, you don't get subjected to all the injected ads. I needed to get these up and going, since the club pays only about 1/2 of the ongoing server costs. I needed to get the ad revenue going again..
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I've edited and cleaned up the "B-series" content from the old site, and made it live, so that everyone can become accustomed to how to navigate to it and through it. It is still a tedious, time-consuming editing process with this old content, as I try to make sure all the pictures are there, the links to larger versions are working correctly, and that the formatting will display OK on phones and tablets. There was a fairly steep learning curve for me with this new software, but I think I now understand how that part of it works fairly well. There were close to 200 pages that simply did not get converted, and those have to be completely rebuilt using this software. Any page that had "subcategories" underneath it, or multiple pages linking from it simply did not get converted. This essentially equates to having to rebuild the first page in each brochure or section of the site Overall, this software is quite powerful, but not at all user-friendly...
- I still haven't found a consultant who's willing/able to tackle moving the Registry over to this new site. So, I'm going to broaden my search...
Hope that adds perspective to where we are, and where we're trying to go!
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