We went to the weekly SLAARC breakfast this morning. We stopped on the way back to the house to get a food processor. I shut down my ASUS laptop PC, packed it for travel, and headed for Mike’s (W8XH) QTH; the first time it has been out of the house since I bought it at the end of April.
I worked with Mike on the new SLAARC WordPress website, walking him back through the process of creating photo galleries. He then uploaded pictures from the 2014 Field Day event, added captions to some of them, and created photo galleries.
I was going to create user accounts, but that turned out to still be a bit premature. In showing Mike around the site we discovered that the home page login widget for the WP-Members plug-in was not working correctly. It was last night, but that was before I installed the Global Hide Admin Toolbar plug-in. Suspecting a minor incompatibility (although the site did not crash, thank goodness) I had to engineer a work-around. The problem and solution turned out to be multifaceted.
One aspect of the problem was that we needed to remove the WP-Members widget from the Home screen, but it was the only place where a logged in user could log out. Another aspect of the problem was the realization that users would have to click on one of the pages in the Member Only Area to get a login screen that would actually log them into the site and allow them to navigate wherever they wanted.
One facet of the solution was to create a new page that would appear at the right hand end of the main menu bar and place the WP-Members widget on that page. It was not immediately obvious to me how to do this, or if we even could, but I eventually figured it out. That provided something on the main menu bar, which remains visible at all times, where users can go to logout. (They should also be able to log in there, but it’s the same widget that didn’t work correctly on the Home page.)
The other facets of the solution involved editing the e-mail that gets sent to a new user when their account is created and editing the User’s Guide, both of which describe the login and logout procedure. As long as I had to create and upload a new version of the User’s a Guide, I decided to put the link on its own page so it would show up in the menu structure and be easier for members to find. I did the same thing with the links to the official club roster documents. Adding those two page then required me to edit two pages to remove the old links. As the saying goes “it’s a process.”
Mike was still creating photo galleries so I drafted a notification e-mail for him to send to the members and sent it to him. He had to leave to run an errand right after I left and planned to deal with sending the e-mail later that evening. I will wait at least 24 hours after he sends it before I start creating user accounts.
I was back home in time to relax and work on this post before John and Diane arrived around 5 PM to visit and have dinner. They brought a salad that Diane made and two bottles of wine; a sweet Shiraz that was unusual but delightful, and a more traditional Cabernet Sauvignon. Linda made a penne pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and mushrooms, and made Italian bread from scratch. She also made the chilled no-bake double chocolate torte for dessert. It was so good everyone had a second piece.
Diane now has an iPad Mini and Linda spent time with her after dinner helping her configure some things. They also managed to get connected through the iMessage feature. Storms rolled in around 9 PM and we had brief periods of heavy rain and diffuse lightning all around. There was a lull in the weather just before 11 PM so they gathered up their things and hit the road. I cleared the table and Linda loaded the dishwasher. She started it and then we were off to bed, tired from a long but very satisfying day.