This page is a collection of miscellanea that the person in charge of administering the LLIR website needs to know.

Overview of our Platform

The Web Master or another member of the LLIR Board must manage LLIR’s account with the following suppliers:

The server on which our website resides is provided by a privately-owned Toronto-based company, HostUpon. LLIR rents storage (file space) and processing on a powerful computer owned by this company. HostUpon provides our installation of WordPress, our database, and our domain name, llirto.ca (formerly llir.ca). Our website stores operational data in the provided installation of MySQL, a popular open-source relational database management system (RDBMS).

WordPress is our web development environment. WordPress is a software product that includes a dashboard and all tools you use from the dashboard. Many features, including the management of webpages, tools for building menus and the Media Library are included in the base installation. Other tools can be added as plugins.
A key plugin is Guttenberg, a powerful and popular page editor used in many web-development platforms. It generates HTML documents (files that Web Browsers can process) but has a visual user interface that anyone who is familiar with word processing can use.

Kadence is a plugin to WordPress and is the theme for the LLIR website. A theme is a software product that enhances the website development platform, by adding features that help website designers add capabilities and webpage authors apply a customized look-and-feel to their websites.
LLIR subscribes to Kadence Pro, an edition of Kadence that adds the Account feature to support login, a extensive library of flexible blocks (components page editors can add to webpages), conditional elements and more.

For a more technical and details description of the architecture of our website, read the page About Forms and Website Architecture.

Keeping our Platform up to Date

The first item under Home in the WordPress dashboard is Updates. Click Updates to see what version of WordPress, the Kadence theme and plugins are installed. You should check at regular intervals whether updates are available. Apart from the following warnings, installing all available updates is generally good practice.

Warning About Installing Updates

Do not install updates to Kadence without first checking with our hired programmer.
At the time of this writing you can contact Alex by sending email to alex@oi-vei.com. The code that Alex writes is stored in PHP files. It customizes our installed theme to connect the website user interface with our database of member information. Installing an update to the theme the .php files. Before you update, coordinate with Alex to determine whether the update is safe and to give him an opportunity to reinstate his files.
Never change from Kadence Pro to different WordPress-compatible theme.

Notes

Customizing the Kadence theme through the Customize section of the dashboard does not affect the PHP code. Installing updates to WordPress itself, Guttenberg, Kadence Pro Blocks and other plugins is safe.

About Pages and Posts

Many WordPress customers build social media websites such as blogs where users participate by posting content. Other WordPress customers are retail businesses that let customer pose questions or supply reviews related to the shopping experience. The concept of user contributions, generally called posts, does not apply to the LLIR website.

The LLIR website consists only of webpages, listed in the Pages section of the dashboard. The LLIR website does not support posts. The Posts section of the WordPress dashboard should always be empty. If the page editor looks a bit different when you adding a new page, check whether you selected to add a post by mistake. If you create and publish a page but then can’t find in in the All Pages view, check whether it is stored as a post.

User and Roles

All LLR members are WordPress users and are listed in the Users section of the WordPress dashboard. Member accounts are created by the the LLIR Registrar when new members are accepted from the waitlist. The process adds a record for each user to the master (MySQL) database in addition to adding a user to the website.
An Administrator can add additional website users using the dashboard, but only the Registrar can add members using a FileMaker Pro utility.

  • Roles determine how much each user can do with dashboard, as follows:
  • No Role – A user with no role has no access to the dashboard. All LLIR members who are not administrators, have No Role.
  • Subscriber – A subscriber can access the dashboard only to update their own account profile the Users section of the dashboard.
  • Contributor – A contributor can add Posts (not webpages) to the website
  • Author – An author can add content to the website
  • Editor – An editor can edit content created by others
  • Administrator – An administrator has full access to all functionality of the WordPress dashboard.
  • Ordinary LLIR members never see the WordPress dashboard because they have no role. The LLIR website does not support member contributions or Posts, so the only role currently in use is Administrator.

Adding Users in the Dashboard

You can WordPress users to give volunteers the ability to test, review and even administer the website. If you create a second user for a volunteer who is also a member, make sure the username and email address fields have different values from in their member profile. All WordPress users for the website can login, see the LLIR member-only area and update their profiles using the My Profile forms.

  • Users created at the dashboard cannot:
  • Submit the registration form that members use to renew their membership and select courses for the next academic year
  • Change their passwords using the Lost your password link on the login form
  • LLIR processes depend upon every member having a unique username and email address. WordPress has no similar rule for users does not check for duplicates.
    Recommendation: Always do the following before you add a user.
  • Open the Users panel and enter the Username you intend to give to a new user beside the Search User box on the upper right.
  • Repeat the searching entering the user’s email address.
  • Make sure the both results say No users found.

How to Add a Website User

  1. From the Users section of the dashboard, click Add New User.
  2. Complete the form that opens.
    • Enter a unique Username. This field cannot be modified after the user is created.
    • Enter a unique Email address. The email address can be bogus provided it has a valid format.
    • Supply a First name and Last Name. The resulting name appears in the header when the user is logged in to the website.
    • Instead of clicking Generate Password, replace the suggested password with something simpler and inform the person.
    • Skip the fields Website and Language.
    • Uncheck the box Send User Notification if you supplied a bogus email address.
    • Accept the default role of Subscriber.
    • Click Add New User.
  3. Correct the new User’s role:
    • In the Users panel, search for the new user and open that user for editing.
    • Locate the Role box and select Administrator or No role for this website from the dropdown list.
    • Scroll down to the bottom of the edit panel and click the Update User button.

Opening the Dashboard

A page editor hint describes a quick way to return to the dashboard when it the dashboard symbol is not visible on the upper left browser window.