The cicaaw.org website was originally created in June 2004. It lasted until August 2010 when a security flaw in the old software version was used to hack the site. At this point, a complete ground-up re-build was undertaken by the current Secretary/Webmaster, James Purciful.
This took an incredible amount of time and late nights. The new website is vastly improved over the old one (both in visible ways and in many behind the scenes ones). In particular, much more and simpler support was added for contributions by members and officers.
No sane person should ever read beyond this point...
The saga of the website rebuild:
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Updated website host software version
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Created new database on new server
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Installed new up-to-date website software
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Researched and selected new theme (visual style)
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Added "Friends of the Club" links
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Created custom slideshow pictures for front page
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Researched and selected calendar approach, including watching videos on how to configure it
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Configured calendar support, with styling for side block and "Upcoming events" block
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Made the new "Event" content type easier to configure for others, and added a couple events
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Created "Member", "Officer", and "Prospect" roles and configured website rights for each
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Added special user profile values for address info, including First/Last name support
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Created custom Member, Officer, and Prospect views, with special formatting, operations, and sorting by First or Last name (old site never had that)
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Enabled "Contact a User" support to allow members to send email to each other without exposing their email addresses on first contact
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Researched and selected best "notification" support (i.e. sending club emails)
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Created custom "notification" content type, with clear options for whether to contact only Officers, only Officers+Members, or all users (including Prospects).
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Now, it's clearer and easier for non-webmasters to send emails to the right people, with nice formatting, and a good subject line!
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Found and pulled old "About us" and "Directions" pages' content from old database
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Added new "About us" and "Directions" pages and menu items (still need to add content to the root page and they could all use some improvements)
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Researched best "Newsletters" approach
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Created custom Newsletter content type and custom "highlights" fields, special view of all newsletters, and custom "Recent Newsletters" block
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Now, it's clear and easy for a non-webmaster to add newsletters and have them correctly show up everywhere with one easy step!
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Found and pulled old Newsletter post text from old database
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Along with Ann's help, laboriously re-entered all Newsletters since the start of 2004, one by one
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Contacted Mike Hamilton about getting his up-to-date roster to cross-reference with the old website database data
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Called Dick Gerard and updated him on all the website status, asked for feedback, got initial approval later on style and direction.
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Found and pulled old users (members and officers) from old database.
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Failed at first attempt to import users (editor regex not powerful enough for the complicated old database string data column formatting).
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Ann reconciled roster with Mike's data.
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Wrote custom C# application to extract old user data and output it as a controlled csv format.
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Installed "user import" website module, imported csv data, rejoiced as all users were imported with all data.
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Enabled dropdown menus from the top menu bar. Looks great! Added sub-menu items for Newsletters and the nwe "Club Info" menu (was "About Us").
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Removed left-side Navigation block menu items for Newsletters, AboutUs, ContactUs, and Directions. This makes it disappear for non-logged-in-users, so it looks cleaner.
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Added a left-side block for "User Counts".
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After watching a video on spam-protection Captcha systems, registered for website security codes and added reCAPTCHA support for the 'Contact us' form. If we ever turn on "Comments", those could be secured as well.
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Finished researching image support alternatives and all the details of presentation and upload.
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Added image support in the form of an 'album' type, with multiple attached photos, which can be uploaded via a separate mass upload (flash-based) module.
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Added an albums view, with custom presentation and styling. Styled the individual album view. Added menu items.
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Researched alternatives and added a "lightbox" module which allows the full size images to be shown in a popup, navigation through the album, and even slideshow mode. It's very slick.
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Custom queries to extract old database photo file names, their dates, and which albums they belonged to.
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Wrote a custom C# program to process the data and the 4700+ photos from the old website. It organizes the data into albums, creates file directories for each album, sets the album folder date to match the newest photo's date in that album, copied the photos into each album, and set each photo's date to match the data from the database export.
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With Ann's help, uploaded 3/4 of the albums to the website so far (all the ones up through 2007). The system is working wonderfully, with few glitches. The upload module is incredible (flash/ajax based).
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Created a "Sponsor" entry type (logo, website, title, description), with a page view of all sponsors (with styling), and a block view at the bottom that shows 3 of them at random. Added links to the sponsors page in some spots, and added a menu item for it. Sponsors have "active date ranges", so they'll automatically start/stop without manual intervention. Slick. And other officers can manage them, not just the webmaster.
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Configured all Officers to be able to upload albums! (Old website never had this.) They can now also create/edit/delete news stories, calendar events, email notifications, newsletters, and Sponsors.
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Researched, selected, and implemented a wysiwyg editor module to be used for all textbox areas. Tons of configuration involved, including painful html/wysiwyg filter settings, customizing style presentation, and updating the mail module styles to get every...single...thing...perfect.
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Updated the About-related information pages, including adding an embedded map for directions.
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With Ann, toured the last few years of AAW Website Contest winners and looked for any other features we might want to add. (Besides all the content the members/officers will now add...right?)
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Installed advanced search support that will work with variations (e.g. work, worked, working) and will search the contents of .pdf flies (e.g. the newsletters!).
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Added support for uploading image attachments for selected node types. The images can then be easily inserted into the WYSIWYG editor! This is intended to allow nice "articles" to be created.
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Added an "article" page type, allowing both members and officers to upload woodturning articles, including a nice overview page with menu items.
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Added the ability to create/manage/edit library materials, where they can automatically be displayed on a nice page with menu item.
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Added an Amazon.com module to allow library items to automatically cross-link based on their ISBN or Amazon ID number. This not only links but pulls data from Amazon to display on our website. Fields can be overridden for non-Amazon library items.
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Lots of CSS styling of pages to make them look better.
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Slowly worked on entering all the existing library materials, with Ann's help.
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Added an "Archive photo" block that displays a random photo from an album, the album name, and links to the album. Used a larger image size for this, generated on the fly like usual.
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Fiddled with page and block caching to not only allow the random photo to update for anonymous users but to still be fast via block caching for the other blocks (per role since the officers have edit options).
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Added theming to the email notifications so they automatically include upcoming events, current newsletter, and recent photo albums, with styling similar to the club website. Added new views blocks to tweak what's in the email. Worked with the CSS styling quite a bit to get it right.
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Ran into major issues with how google mail displays html email (it's very rudimentary). After a couple days, found various approaches to get it working (tables instead of divs, special module to convert css styles to inline form, etc.).
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Added a "Turning gallery" type to allow members to upload their own albums. Added page support, menu item, styling, and merged them into the "Archive photo" block.
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Added a list of "users without email" that is only visible to officers and is customized to show the street, city, and zip to aid in mailing out physical newsletter copies, when necessary.
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Summary: So far, have installed 34 total additional modules, 1 theme, and 1 library beyond the core software itself. Several of these approaches are "next generation" beyond what the old website had.
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This list really scratches the surface of describing everything. But the resulting website is world class.
