The structure of the Mini Cooper Register website is provided by the open source web site system WordPress, this consists of a core product to which “Plugins” are added to provide specific functionality used within the site. The site is hosted on a Linux server located in an Internet Data Centre.
There are a number of plugins utilised, some off-the-shelf, some (with the prefix of zuzz) developed specifically for motor club websites.
This documentation does not cover the details of the WordPress core or the off-the-shelf plugins, there are links at the end to other websites with this information.
Index
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- Site Administration
- Access to the site
- User Roles
- Regional Representative
- Website setup
- Website backup
- Website Home Page
- Car Register
- Contact Page
- News Posts
- Plugins
Site Administration
Daily tasks
– Check Dashboard -> Users -> Confirm User Registration for outstanding requests – Check Facebook -> Moderate Group -> Member requests – Authorise if a member
Weekly tasks
– Check Dashboard -> Plugins -> Installed plugins – update any plugins with latest versions
Access to the site
For a person to access the site, they must first register, the procedure involved is:
Person uses the “Register for Website/Forum” page to submit a request
The Webmaster receives an email notifying that a request is pending
The Webmaster uses the Dashboard -> Users -> Confirm User Registration page to list pending requests, each request is checked against the membership database (http://www.minicooper.lpl-uk.com/admin/), if the person is a member, their Role is changed to “Contributor” otherwise (if a valid person) it is set to “Subscriber”, the application is then approved. and the user will receive a confirmation email. Note: The plugin “Anti Spam by CleanTalk” filters out most of the bogus applications.
User Roles
The standard WordPress roles of Subscriber and Contributor are used, Subscribers have access to the website and forum but not the members only areas which are only available to Contributors (and other specific non-Wordpress roles), in addition the role of Administrator is used by the Webmaster to access all areas of the site and the administrative Dashboard area.
The following non-wordpress roles are used to add extra options to the website menu (all of which may also access those area of the website available to a “Contributor”:
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- Committee member
- Regional Representative – See Zuzz Mailing below
- Region Coordinator – See Zuzz Mailing below
- MiniSport – provides access to member checker page
- Booking Trade Admin – Manage trade stand bookings for Beaulieu (See Zuzz Booking below)
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Regional Representative
The Regional Representative should have their role of “Regional Representative” added as an extra role, this will cause the Regional Representative menu option to appear below “Members” which in turn will have the “Send Emails” and “Region Members” option below it – see Zuzz Mailing below for details.
In order to give the Regional Representative the ability to edit their region’s page, the Author of the page should be set to their username and the edit-pages and edit-published-pages capabilities should be selected .
Web site setup
The settings for the website are maintained using the Zuzz Settings option on the menu, this is only visible to the administrator. Club name – appears on various pages and emails Login Page id – A page is required that contains the shortcode “login-form”, this field should be set to the id (not the slug) of the page. The id can be found by looking at the URL on the page edit page. e.g. for /wp-admin/post.php?post=382&action=edit the id is 382 Password Reset Page Id – A page is required that contains the shortcode “zuzz-reset-password”, the id can be found as above.
There are two types of email address for MCR, email accounts which hold the messages on the server until they are read by the user’s email client, and email forwarders which transfer the received messages directly to the user’s own email account. All the email addresses are for the minicooper.org domain. The email addresses are provided by the CPanel system on the server.
Web site backup
The website consists of a collection of files and the database. The database contains all the web pages plus the dynamic content such as the the forum posts.
The website files and database are backed up automatically on a daily basis. In the event of a failure, all, or part, of the website may be restored by the company that manage the server data centre.
Website Home Page
The home page (Welcome) consists of a banner, a meta slider to cycle through a collection of images and a couple of areas to display posts (one for category “welcome”, the other for “info”. The banner when uploaded gets cropped and then displayed as a large image, the effect being to make the image blurred. To return the image to its correct sharp state, the original uploaded file needs to be renamed as the cropped file.
Car Register
The Car Register is a self serve feature where members can register details of their own cars, in addition the person responsible for each register has access to the details of the cars on the register. There is also a Super Registrar who oversees the operation and has some additional tools for that purpose.
Contact Page
The contact page is provided by the Zuzz Club plugin. The contact page is “Contact Us” on the menu and the list of contacts is maintained using the Contact Maintenance option. The Contact Us page is visible to anyone, the Contact Maintenance only to the relevant roles.
News Posts
The news post feature uses reserved Post categories sticky-news, latest-news and mini-sport.
News posts may be added using the “Add a Post” menu option, the maintenance of existing News posts is handled by the News Post Maint option, both of which are enabled for the relevant roles. News posts appear on the home page using “Post in Sidebar” widgets. mini-sport posts appear on the Mini Sport page.
Plugins
The plugins are maintained through the Dashboard -> Installed plugins page. The providers of the off-the-shelf plugins will release updates from time to time, the Webmaster must check for these on a regular basis and update the installed plugin when a new release is available. amr shortcode any widget Anti-Spam by CleanTalk – This intercepts all attempts to access the website access registration form and checks for bogus request, only allowing through those that are considered to be genuine. At present 400 to 500 bogus requests a re filtered out each month and there has been no evidence of genuine attempts being filtered out. The suppliers update the plugin on a regular basis to keep up with the scam attempts and therefore the plugin should be updated frequently. Confirm User Registration – Contact Form 7 Email Subscribers & Newsletters Events Manager Flow-Flow Lite MetaSlider Nav Menu Roles Photo Gallery Restrict Content SendGrid Smush User Role Editor WD Google Maps WP Symposium Pro WP Symposium Pro (Extensions) WP-UserOnline
Zuzz Club
This plugin provides the Concours entry system – see Zuzz Documentation for details
Zuzz Booking
This plugin provides the Trade stand booking system for Beaulieu The event for the site plan displayed on the website is determined by the parameter of the short code on the site plan page, it is the event id number
Zuzz Register This system provides the Registers for the member’s cars. There are three levels of use to the system: Member, Registrar and Super Registrar – A member may enter details of their car(s), including photos of the car. – A registrar can display a list of all the cars in their Register and for each car they may display the car details. – The Super Registrar can access any of the registers and in addition to viewing the car details, they can also make changes. All members have access to their list of cars through the “My cars” menu option. Using the User menu in the dashboard, a registrar must be given the extra capability of the “Registrar” role and the relevant register(s) must be ticked. The Super Registrar must be given the extra capability of “Super Registrar” and must have the Super-registrar box ticked. All members must have their membership number added in the user profile Photos are stored in the uploads/register directory
Zuzz Mailing
The zuzz-mailing plugin provides the facility to email members without knowledge of their email address (part of the club’s GDPR provisions). It provides both bulk emailing to members on a mailing list and individual emails. Mailing lists are provided for each of the regional areas, the committee members and the traders at each Beaulieu event. In order to use a mailing list, a member must have the relevant Circulation list (or lists) ticked in the user maintenance screen and the Sender Email Address field MUST be completed with the address that the emails are to be sent from (This is the reply address in the email). wp-config.php is modified to include define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true); which stops the automatic running of wp-cron every time a page is opened. A PHP cron job is defined to run the synch job daily that aligns the Lavenham’s database with the website database. Uses database tables: wp-zuzz-mailing-list – has one entry for each mailing list, if the list is for a region, the region field should be set to 1, the latitude and longitude will then be used when searching for the nearest regions. wp-zuzz-mail-address – name, town, email address, lat, long, etc of each person on a mailing list wp-zuzz-member-check – used by the synch program that compares the wp-zuzz-mail-address contents with the membership database wp-zuzz-subscribers – one entry for each person per list The format of the email sent is determined from the template in …/wp-content/plugins/zuzz-mailing//templates/template1.php
