Not too long ago, I changed the membership system on this website. Sometime I think I’ll write a post about all of the different membership-type stuff I’ve used on various sites. They’re all good — in their own way. But I’m finding that, for this website, I think that the old system worked better. So I’m taking the time and changing it back.
Much of the work has been done on a staging website but there’s a lot more to do. Some of it needs to be on the live website, for various reasons, and I’m hesitant to work on a staging site for too long because event submissions come rolling in and then I need to transfer them to preserve them.
So, just for a bit, the site will be in disarray for a little while. This shouldn’t be too noticeable to visitors who don’t come here regularly, but if you’ve been here more than once, you might notice some changes. Here’s what has changed or what is in progress:
- Changed back to the old templates for user profiles.
- We are having to redo social login (i.e. Facebook, etc.) and plan to get that done in the near future. We were going to try to work with what we had, but we kept having issues while our old social login worked pretty flawlessly.
- We changed the post submission form back to the one we had for a little while.
- We removed the main forums and went back to a system just for frequently asked questions. We’re working on adding answers back in but plan to put up the “Ask a question” button again soon. Forums will go back to groups format.
- We put a shop page back in — this is both because we like to “curate” items related to the PNW, cycling, travel, etc and because it can also serve for photography downloads as we’re trying to consolidate many of our galleries on one site.
- We’re adding in a revenue share for some posts, but are not done with that as of yet.
- We’ve added some new post categories and types. Every time we start to think “we’re going to make another blog” we find we can’t manage more than one.
- Primary post types will still be dedicated to the PNW, photography, outdoor activities, and travel.
- We created an “asides” post type for those times when we want to write about something completely unrelated like WordPress, or write a personal essay.
- We created a new “recipes” post type and may move some of our recipes back over here.
- We made changes (and continue to make a few) to newsletter subscriptions. We’ve tried to keep existing subscribers in line with the items they already subscribed to and are trying to narrow down our forms a bit.
