This collection of notes maybe useful to whoever is now managing WVEC’s website (in no particular order at the moment).
The current WordPress theme (Frontier) is an extremely simple, fast theme that provides the basic functionality required of all WordPress themes. The theme is designed to be easily customized via plugins, and a child theme that facilitates custom functions, templates, and css code. The theme provides customizable ‘responsive’ view formats for mobile phones and devices.
The child theme provides eleven “shortcode” functions that provide a wide variety of custom functionality. Documentation of the shortcodes and their various optional attributes is in comments within the functions.php file contained in the “frontier-child” folder in the WordPress theme directory. The ‘functions-site.php’ file in the same directory include several functions unique to WVEC’s website, such as the code that generates the WV house and senate contact lists.
Documentation about unique features of the current website, including workflow notes on using the CiviCRM mailing system to send alerts are available here. These notes have primarily been meant to serve as reminders (after brief training sessions) to new/transient lobbyists or other staffers who wish to post content directly.
Default content for posts instantiated using an elist template (i.e., header and footer fluff for the email version of an alert or newsletter) is contained in the ‘def-con’ folder contained in the child theme. It can be edited with any text or html editor, but it has to be valid html code appropriate for being sent as an email. The default content filename must correspond to a template file in the child theme.
Tthe ‘show_posts’ shortcode is widely used throughout the site to generate lists of posts in various formats on the home page, archive pages, in various sidebars, and in digest format newsletters. If the redesign plan is to switch to a different WordPress theme, this function would need to be replicated in an associated child theme (unless the plan is to eliminate most existing content)..
The child theme also provides custom post and page templates. A WordPress template controls everything about how a post or page is displayed,including the headers, menus, sidebars and footers.
For example, an action alert has a sidebar (showing recent AA’s), related posts below the alert, and an optional comment (when viewed in landscape view on a tablet, laptop, or desktop with adequate resolution.
On a mobile phone in portrait view the displays re-organizes itself with a mobile menu at the top followed by the primary content of the post. Scrolling down show the related posts, comment section, and finally, of least importance, the sidebar.
BTW, the shortcode functionality that automatically generates related post lists relies on WordPress tags, automatically choosing the most recent posts that share similar tags, so it’s important to note that WordPress tags serve a completely different function that so-called hashtags used in social media. WordPress tags are meant to be used as part of the ‘taxonomy’ of the website – i.e., how content is organized, catalogued, and indexed on the site (which is especially important if there are decades of content involved). I’d be glad to talk about the associated nuances and best practices if anyone is interested in maintaining any of this sort of functionality.
Other types of posts have different sidebars, such as a list of recent newsletters in the sidebar of a newsletter, whereas the sidebar of a newsletter article contains an index list of the articles within the given newsletter.
I also note that the website currently includes an event calendar and newslink plugin that could be put to good use displaying events and news in a timely fashion (rather than burying them in once a month newsletter articles).