Sagamore Hills PTA website

The Sagamore Hills PTA has a website at sagamorehillspta.org to serve the Sagamore Hills Elementary School community. There are other Sagamore websites too.

See the Sagamore Hills online page, and email the Sagamore Online mailing list (email • archives • subscribe & more) to discuss.

It is a Wordpress installation with Dreamhost.

To Do

• Do some cleanup after the Wordpress backend refresh --Dave (talk) 14:14, 12 September 2014 (EDT)
  • Fix simple problems with existing content (broken links/images)
  • Make sure pages have cute URLs
  • Deleting old media files (and making sure good ones are somewhere on the Sagamore Google Drive (may already be done))
• Find big images for each page's "featured image" --Dave (talk) 14:14, 12 September 2014 (EDT)
• Look into Wordpress new themeing (see also: Sagamore PTA Wordpress notes) --Dave (talk) 11:40, 2 February 2013 (EST)
  • Now I'm looking into balancing stock theme capabilities vs customizations, especially things like custom fields, custom post types, and such. --Dave (talk) 10:33, 25 April 2014 (EDT)
    • Going to try and keep it simple (, stupid) for now and just have dumb pages manually linking to each other and manually defined navigation --Dave (talk) 14:14, 12 September 2014 (EDT)
  • Possible starting points: Twenty Twelve, the default Wordpress theme, supposed to support major Wordpress features (probably the best to child off of); SemPress, semantic goodness; Toolbox & BlankSlate, in the raw to start from (almost) scratch --Dave (talk) 16:10, 15 February 2013 (EST)
    • With the 2014-09 update, using default Twenty Fourteen (with a header image) --Dave (talk) 14:14, 12 September 2014 (EDT)

Done

• Experiment with different website platforms:

  • test-wordpress.sagamorehillspta.org/ (Sagamore PTA Wordpress notes)
  • test-google-sites.sagamorehillspta.org (Sagamore PTA Google Sites notes)

  • Discussed at website meeting with Dave & John, continue discussion on mailing list (email • archives • subscribe & more) --Dave (talk) 21:00, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
  • Thinking not Google Sites --Dave (talk) 10:33, 25 April 2014 (EDT)
  • Chose Wordpress while deciding Sagamore online goals 2014#Website_platform --Dave (talk) 16:00, 7 May 2014 (EDT)

✓ Now have a fresh Wordpress installation with old content imported --Dave (talk) 14:14, 12 September 2014 (EDT)

• Use prettier urls? See Using Permalinks and the the settings. --Dave (talk) 22:21, 3 February 2013 (EST)
  • Leaving the site as is for now, and making sure this happens when new theming happens --Dave (talk) 10:33, 25 April 2014 (EDT)
  • Done with the site migration 2014-09-11 --Dave (talk) 14:14, 12 September 2014 (EDT)
• Styled the http://test-google-sites.sagamorehills.org/ and took Sagamore PTA Google Sites notes --Dave (talk) 19:40, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
• Use Google Calendar—embed in website and allow public subscribing

✓ Setup a calender, still working out the details --Dave (talk) 22:35, 25 August 2013 (EDT)

✓ Run a test on the PTA Calendar page --Dave (talk) 22:46, 26 August 2013 (EDT)

• Need to provide subscriptions instructions from school & PTA websites (like those at the Sagamore calendar page --Dave (talk) 17:58, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

✓ Done (for the PTA website (the school site has the sidebar)) --Dave (talk) 19:20, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

• Suggest adding a newsletter signup opportunity to homepage (Contact provides code under Contacts, Grow My Contact List) --Dave (talk) 17:33, 3 February 2013 (EST)

✓ Done (for PTA homepage anyway) -Dave (talk) 20:34, 18 August 2013 (EDT)

• Remove the ability to leave comments on PTA website pages—the site is not a blog to host discussion, it just disseminates information. Instead, make sure contact information is readily available on all pages. --Dave (talk) 11:16, 2 February 2013 (EST)

• Turned off interaction (notifying linked blogs, pingback & trackbacks, comments) by default for new content --Dave (talk) 16:46, 2 March 2013 (EST)
• Disabled interaction on existing pages(13)/posts(3) (all we ever saw was spam, and our contact information (email) is available on the site)--Dave (talk) 18:53, 12 May 2013 (EDT)

• Link to the Constant Contact provided webpage for weekly newsletters instead of copy & pasting them onto the PTA homepage. --Dave (talk) 11:31, 2 February 2013 (EST)

Started discussion --Dave (talk) 22:16, 3 February 2013 (EST)

✓ Done --Dave (talk) 14:02, 11 February 2013 (EST)

Notes

• Cliff Valley uses Finalsite (who provides nice suggestions for a school's homepage)
• A couple site solutions were looked into when Dave attended the 2014 Ga PTA CLT#IT_Vendors

How To

Link to the newsletter

The most recent weekly Wildcat Update Newsletter should be linked from the Sagamore PTA homepage.

Two methods are listed below, in order of preference. There are two because sometimes only one of the two will work.

Method 1

1. From an email newsletter, copy the link from, "Having trouble viewing this email? Click here"
2. Use the first part of the link (with the ca parameter (the c and cc parameters are not wanted)). For example:

   http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=bc3db49d-a82b-402d-8845-75ee3de7475e&c=cc737c60-de1b-11e2-93b0-d4ae528440e0&ch=cc763b80-de1b-11e2-93b0-d4ae528440e0

Method 2

1. Login to the PTA Constant Contact account
2. Find the Email Details page of the email (newsletter) to link to (in Recent Work, or Email)
3. Under Social Sharing, select Simple Share, and find the URL (something like: http://conta.cc/UPZ93d)

Show discussion

To show current action from the Sagamore PTA discussion groups on the website, display the groups' syndication feed:

1. Collect all the Sagamore PTA discussion groups' IDs; they're the unique part in the URL
2. Find the right syndication feed address; they're available from a group's "About" page (e.g. About Garden)
   • https://groups.google.com/a/groups.sagamorehillspta.org/forum/feed/garden/topics/atom.xml?num=15
3. Aggregate the feeds into one; ChimpFeedr might be good
   • e.g. http://mix.chimpfeedr.com/ba350-Sagamore-discussion-topics
4. Display the aggregated feed on the website, like with the built-in Wordpress RSS widget.

Accounts

Several accounts are associated with managing the website.

Wordpress

The Wordpress site can be logged into by a single user, admin, and is assigned the email address communications@sagamorehillspta.org.

The password known to:

• Anyone who has access to the Sagamore Google Drive and the Password file there
• Vera Kornylak

Log

The log account, is used to view website-access statistics generated by Dreamhost's Analog.

Server

If you need access to the server files, check out the server account.

Database

Wordpress uses a database account.

Usage

See: Sagamore Hills PTA website logs 2012

History

• 2014-09 A fresh start with a new Wordpress installation and theme after looking into other platforms
• The first PTA website was served at ptasagamorehills.org, as early as 2008-07 and no later than 2011-09.