Why the new Site
A few weeks ago, wordpress got an update changing a few things in it’s API what caused a few of our plugins to break. This resulted in things like not being able to login, secure pages you should only be able to see if you are a member to be public, etc.
This mostly happened because we use a lot of plugins that are later edited and customized to fit our needs and to avoid this in the future, the web committee has decided to start again from scratch: creating all plugins themselves (optimized for Student Sports Clubs) and when finished these plugins will be published to WordPress so other Student Sport Clubs can use them!
Current Status
Currently, only the theme and the events plugin are somewhat operational.
The Theme
The theme is currently dynamic enough to use on resolutions between 400px and 1920px width. This means that it is usable for both mobile and desktop use.
However, the theme is not even close to be ready: the lists (posts list etc) are terrible, when on a width below 783px (mobile) the site branding is hidden, the menu for mobile is very limited, the sidebar does not disappear if it is empty, etc.
We are going to work on this, but for now it does not have priority.
The Events Plugin
This plugin is created to easily manage registration for events. This plugin is currently operational, but the functionality is very basic (locations are not yet working, managing pending events is currently manual, etc).
We won’t be working on this until after the 16th of January (to avoid losing registrations for the upcoming Nationwide Student Survival Weekend (if you haven’t registered yet, do so, it will be awesome!).
What’s Next
One of the largest problems we’re currently facing is the user registration.
We can migrate the users from the first server to the new, however: we cannot migrate the passwords because those are so strongly encrypted and hashed that even the web committee can’t access them (for obvious security reasons).
This means that all users will get a new password again (which they will be able to change of course).
And even when we migrate the users, the work doesn’t stop: We’ve got to re-enable the synchronisation with MailChimp (where we send those awesome emails with) and to Google Apps (where we manage the mailing lists and general email traffic) and because both of them value security (as do we) the authorisation is going to be a lot of work.