The Midget and Sprite Club website contents are provided by the WordPress product, this is a very comprehensive free content managements system that is used to provide a vast number of websites around the world.
The basic WordPress installation provides the facility to display web pages that include images held in the Media library, define menus and hold a list of users. There are many other features but these are the basic ones we use.
WordPress is structured in such a way that plugins can be added to provide additional functionality. Plugins are software that are provided by third-party companies and individuals, some are free, some require a license to be paid, we use a number of plugins to enable the website to provide the required services, the section below lists the plugins and the function.
Users
The website is generally visible to anyone, however there are certain areas that are restricted to members of the club. To gain access to the restricted areas, a member must register, providing a user name and password and be approved.
The approval is manual and involves checking the applicant’s details with the membership database, if valid, the User role is set to “Subscriber” and the “Authorise” function used.
User Roles
In standard form, WordPress defines 5 roles, each with different capabilities, we use:
Administrator – full access to all areas of the web site
Subscriber – Member of the club with access to the Member’s Only areas
In addition we have the custom roles of:
Area Rep
Area Delegate
Shop Manager
The Area Rep and Area Delegate roles are created by the User Role Editor plugin
The Shop Manager role is created by the WooCommerce plugin used to support the club shop.
Area Rep
To make a user an Area Rep, change the role to Area Rep, tick the Area Rep permission group, add the email address to Sender Email Address and tick the area Circulation list
Plugins
Certain functionality of the website is provided by WordPress plugins, these are the plugins in use
Event Manager
Provides the club calendar.
To include a list of events for an area in the area page, use shortcode events_list category=”nad-events” limit=5]
Nav Menu Rules
This adds the ability to control the visibility of the menu items by setting the option to be visible to all or just those logged on, if logged on then the role of the user allowed to see the option is set, for example the Area Rep option is only visible to the Administrator and the Area Rep roles.
ProfilePress
The main menu across the top of the page contains a number of PP short codes, when the user is not logged in, the menu contains Log in, when they are, it contains Log out and the name of the user is displayed. The Log in and Log out options are shown/hidden because the Nav Menu Rules plug-in.
User Role Editor
This is used to create the extra roles not avalable in standard WordPress, eg Member, Lapsed,, etc
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that provides the club shop, membership join/renew and payment facilities.
Defined within it are products, one for each shop item plus membership products for new membership, membership renewal and extra family members.
The membership products must have the “Membership” category assigned to them, this switches on the DD mandate as a payment option.
Payment gateways
WorldPay
This is used for taking credit/debit card payments.
GoCardless
This interface is used to set up a Direct Debit mandate and to start a subscription that takes the annual payments for the membership. It is only available for membership products. To be visible on the Checkout form, it must be selected on the WooCommerce –> Settings –> Payments page
The order notification email is modified to include the extra lines for updating the membership database by the …/wp-contents/themes/twentyseventeen-child/woocommerce/emails/admin-new-order.php
Set-up
To create the email for the membership secretary that provides the information for the membership database, the file /public_html/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen-child/woocommerce/emails/admin-new-order.php must be uploaded to the site. This is fired by WooCommerce when a new order is added.
zuzz-mailing
Uses database tables:
wp-zuzz-mailing-list – list of all mailing lists, column region set to 1 if the list is for a region
wp-zuzz-mail-address – name, town, email address, lat, long, etc of each person on a mailing list
wp-zuzz-member-check – used by the synch program that compares the wp-zuzz-mail-address contents with the membership database
wp-zuzz-subscribers – one entry for each person per list
The format of the email sent is determined from the template in
../wp-content/plugins/zuzz-mailing//templates/template1.php
zuzz-utils
This plugin provides a number of functions:
Newsletter
There are two pages provided by shortcodes:
zuzz-upload-newsletters] – provides a page to specify the year, month and PDF file for a newsletter, the PDF is uploaded and stored in the current month’s uploads folder and wp_post and wp_postmeta entries added to hold the details. Thumbnail images of the first page of the PDF are automatically generated.
zuzz-show-newsletters] – provides a page that displays links to all the uploaded newsletters
This facility requires the following to be added to the CSS for the site:
.nletterthumb {
float: left;
}
.nlettertxt {
clear:both;
}
Log in and registration
The login and registration form are provided by the shortcode [login-form] which has been added to the Login page which is accessed through the Login menu option.
The Forgotten password link sends an email to the user that included a link back to the Reset Password page that contains the shortcode [zuzz-reset-password]
The page reference (ID or permalink name) for both the Login and Reset Password pages must be added to the configuration using the Zuzz Settings menu option
