Hosting Service
The website is hosted at : https://my.cgcdesignco.uk/
The hosting service is associated with Richard Qualington of ACRE. If you require webmaster access you will need to discuss with Richard and CGC Hosting the provision of login credentials.
The hosting service is managed in the Client Area: https://my.cgchosting.co.uk/manage
CGC will need to provide login credentials.
2023 Update
The website has been greatly simplified in order to support easier update. Updates will be made by a single authority directly to the live site, with no use of the staging provision.
Story pages may be added and ANM pages may be edited – this is all achieved through the wp-admin page. The only critical webmaster actions will be:
- Monitor email arriving at webmaster@100ruralyears.uk (https://my.cgcdesign.co.uk/services/968542792e2451eb/email/webmail)
- Take site backups after (major) updates and store on the google drive associated with the above address
The password for the webmaster email can be changed via the client area
The Google Drive account is associated with the webmaster email and so account recovery can be performed given access to those emails.
FTP Service
The FTP Host is ftp.100ruralyears.uk and an account exists with Username acre-ftp@100ruralyears.uk. The password can be changed via the Client Area. Note that you will need to add your ip in the FTP management section of the client area.
Be aware that the Server file system provides public_html and public_html root sub-directories. Direct FTP initiated changes (eg. updating the acre-100 WordPress theme) must be performed in the public_html sub-directory – such changes will be promoted to live by the Staging tool just as WordPress native changes are promoted.
e-mail Service
(Initially) 2 e-mail accounts have been created:
contribute@100ruralyears.uk – this address is exposed in the website and is intended for contributions from citizen-historians and of ‘recollections (voices) from anyone.
webmaster@100ruralyears.uk – this address is given in the (non-public) guides so that editors can request an update of the public website. This address is also associated with a Google Analytics account.
Malware Scanning Service
Automatic malware scanning takes place daily. A scan can be requested via the Malware Scan tool in the Security panel of the Client Area.
Backup and Restore
The website can be backed-up (and restored from back-up) via the Back-up&Restore tool in the Web Files panel of the Client Area. Backups are transient and must be saved elsewhere immediately upon completion. To date, back-ups have been copied over to the 100 Rural Years Google Drive.
Staging Service
As well as hosting our live website our hosting provider also provisions a staging platform. This can be accessed at: https://100ruralyears.uk/
All changes should be applied to the staging platform, not the live website. Once changes are proofed and known to be correct on the staging platform they can be promoted to the live platform – there are however brand and legal compliance concerns when publishing content and so the webmaster must have appropriate authority to publish. In the case of any doubt discuss with Richard Qualington: mailto:r.quallington@acre.org.uk
Staging is promoted to live via the Staging tool in the WordPress Tools panel of the Client Area, using the Clone into Live button on the righthand side of the screen (after confirming to mean to do this).
Cloning the staging platform to the live platform can take ‘several minutes’ during which time the live platform is unstable; and so this should be performed at ‘quiet times’.
Before cloning into live ALWAYS clone from live first in order to preserve comments.
This means that changes cannot sit on staging for long, else new comments received at live will be overwritten when staging is promoted.
It’s a good idea to clone Live into staging immediately after moderating any comments on Live.
The AW Stats tool in the Logs & Stats panel of the Client Area can be used to identify ‘quiet times’. The Summary view includes an Hours section.
Google Services
A google account associated with the Webmaster e-mail address has been created, account recovery can be performed via that e-mail address.
Google Drive
The google account has an associated Google Drive space, in which backups of the website are stored. This Drive space is shared with ACRE representatives who will make their own provision for the long-term archive of the website backup. There should always be at least one, latest version, backup of the website in the Drive space.
Google Analytics
A web-property has been created within the Webmaster’s google account to enable Google Analytics. The analytics dashboard can be access at: https://analytics.google.com/analytics
WordPress Services
The website is powered by WordPress and this can be administered via the WordPress Admin tool in the WordPress Tools panel of the Client Area, or by visiting https://100ruralyears.uk/wp-admin
User Accounts
The main administrative account uses Username: acre-admin
This account is associated with the webmaster’s e-mail address (webmaster@100ruralyears.uk).
There were (initially) no other WordPress users defined, all editting and publishing was (is) performed by the webmaster.
Administrative Notifications
The general WordPress Administration notification e-mail address is also the Webmaster’s e-mail.
Health Status
Check the system health (available on the WordPress admin Dashboard) status on a weekly basis and perform any required updates.
Design Assets
The vast majority of content is managed via the WordPress framework. However, there are a number of Photoshop PSD files that support the generation of standard images – these are the ‘default style’ featured images of pages and the ‘county cut-out’ masks for the ACRE Network Member pages; as so:
The PSD (editable) versions of these images are stored in the design-assets sub-directory of the staging-html directory and can be downloaded via the FTP tool.
Home Page Background Image
The homepage uses a full-window background image. This is set in the acre-100 theme. Edit the file /public_html/wp-content/themes/acre-100/style.css. Modify the background-image attribute in the body.home rule.
Regular Activities
On a weekly basis
- Check the Malware Scan status in the Client Area
- Check the WordPress Health Status in the Admin Dashboard
On change of content
- Acquire authority to publish
- Back-up the website using the Client Area tool
- Store the back-up in the Google Drive space
- Promote staging to live using the Client Area tool
- Once the update is known to be good and stable (1 week following publication) create an additional back-up
Following change of content
Load the new page(s) in a web browser and perform a final sanity check:
- Proofread the content
- Ensure external links work and open in a new tab
- Ensure internal links work and open in the existing tab
- Ensure all images open in the lightbox when clicked
- Open the web developer’s tools of the browser and ensure that there are no console errors reported
- Run the new page(s) URL(s) through the Facebook share debugger tool and ensure a well-formed embed item is returned: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
- Run the page(s) URL(s) through the Twitter Card Validator: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
- For major updates submit a site-map to Google via the search console at: https://search.google.com/search-console
- Consider submitting to additional search engines, see instructions at: https://yoast.com/help/submit-sitemap-search-engines/
To roll-back changes
Restore the latest back-up from the Google Drive space using the Backup & Restore tool of the Client Area. Roll-back to earlier versions is also possible. Following roll-back clone the live platform back into the staging platform to ensure both are in-synch.
To maintain comments use a SQL query on the live site DB before cloning a roll-back into Live. I offer no further detail as such process has not been executed in the Proof-of-Concept.