The reason for the change
First, I have been struggling to make a decent website with the current set of software tools I chose but with every feature the tools allowed me to provide (Groups, Messaging, Forums) I had to deal with he shortcomings of my software choices to provide more important features (Files for instance).
Secondly I’m finding that the software is a heavy resource user meaning we needed a fairly powerful host to run the site. This didn’t seem to be an issue when I first started but as I added more to the website it began to slow down and I had to move our site to a more powerful and more expensive server. The way these hosting sites deal with this is to provide a very inexpensive starting fee for a 3 year contract but switch to their normal prices once that contract is up. The contract will be up in June of 2023 and we will need to find a less expensive home for our site which will necessitate a lower end server to run what we have and I don’t believe the current website will run well if we do.
A third reason for making this change is the fact that there’s been insufficient use of the website features to warrant the continued support and maintenance of the website code. Couple that with the distinct possibility that someone else may be needed to maintain the website means coming up with a simpler design using less complicated software.
Timing
I have already rebuilt a majority of the static pages on my test website at https://wgktestsite.com/ It’s currently missing some key features like an easy login, upload and display of website documentation / files and a working Image Gallery. These will be added to my test site over the next few days (today being February 23, 2022). I expect the site changes to be functional sometime this weekend. At that point I will shutdown the old site and install the new.
The reason for this short notice on timing is basically my window of availability to do this.
Features being kept
Here’s the following feature set that I plan on providing with the new code.
- Upload and display of the club documentation. Agenda’s etc.
- Calendar of events
- Member display
- Knowledge Base
- I will try to keep the easy login/logout feature if I can
