National Association of Writers and Groups (development site – not for public use – official site: www.nawg.co.uk)

Made some changes to competition related articles and taxonomy:

• Generally made article titles less terse, often by simply including the word "competition".
• All Pam's People competition articles are now grouped by a similarly named tag.

Further organisational work on advertising related content:

• Removed "advert" and "advertising" tags from all articles, now we have categories instead.
• Removed some articles from the "adverts" category, that represented competitions or events from members.

• Renamed the titles for the 100 word mini-tales competition, from 'MTC: *' to '"100" *'.

• Increased the size of the "recent articles" widget from 5 items to 8 items.
• Reduced the size of the "recent comments" widget from 5 items to 3 items.

• The "Who Are NAWG?" category has been retired, in favour of the "People" category. There was no point in having two categories with the same purpose.
• Added an "Advertising" category, to cover the following:
  • Advertisements, whether paid-for or gratis for members.
  • Information about how to advertise on the site.
  • Information about how to advertise in Link magazine.

• There is now an administration category hierarchy, for committee and staff use. This is a restricted area and includes:
  • Meeting agendas and minutes.
  • Reports.
  • Articles for internal use.
• The "report" tag has been re-purposed as "minutes", for committee meeting minutes.

Reorganised some of the taxonomy:

• A "services" category has been created. Some articles have been moved into this new category.
• The "anthology" category has been absorbed into the "books" category.
• A new "TWP" tag has been added, to mark articles about The Write Path.

• A significant number of articles used to live under the "group news" category, but were not appropriate to that category, as they did not relate to writing groups. This was a hangover from when all advertising was categorised this way (something now done using the "advert" tag).

  The articles in question have now been moved into other categories, more appropriate to their content.

The way sets of articles and sets of responses are displayed has been changed. This was done to improve clarity. The new behaviour is given below.

Sets of Articles

• Single item – displayed in full.
• Two or more items – displayed as excerpts.
• Six or more items – displayed in a table.

Sets of Responses

• Single item – displayed in full.
• Two or more items – displayed in a table.

With the old behaviour, multiple articles were displayed in full (for sets of up to 4 items). Users may not have scrolled down and realised there were more than one, especially with long articles. With excerpts, it is easier to see that there are more to follow.

Removed the following deprecated email relays:

• #Ym9va2luZy1ldmVudHNAbmF3Zy5jby51aw==# (use #ZXZlbnRzQG5hd2cuY28udWs=# instead).
• #Y29tcC1uYXdnQG5hd2cuY28udWs=# (use #Y29tcC1tZW1iZXJzQG5hd2cuY28udWs=# instead).

Renamed some categories:

• "Writing Groups" → "Writing Groups Directory",
• "Directories" → "Resources".

Based on a review over the use of pingbacks, the following was done:

• The WordPress settings were altered to disable pingbacks by default.

• All articles had their pingback status set to "closed".

  UPDATE {tpfx}_posts SET ping_status='closed', to_ping='', pinged=''

• All existing pingbacks (27) were moved into the "trash" state.

• Updated the submissions page of the "100 competition", to include three payment options.
• The 100 competition rules now state that prose is allowed, but not poetry.

The official NAWG address is now stored in a text file. This will make things easier to alter on the website, should this address ever change. To include the address in an article, do not paste it in, but use the following code instead:

[file src="nawg.address.txt"/‍]

• Added "winners" tag for articles that contain stories, poems and other writing by previous competition winners.

• Mini-tales competition: added clarification to the submission instructions, regarding story titles, e-mail subject line and file attachments.

• Introduced the "headlines" panel at the top. For content, this is fed by a sub-page, which typically has a bullet point list of headline items.

• Changed the address for postal orders, due to staff changes.

• Changed category names for simplicity:

  • "100 Competition" to "100 Words",
  • "Competition Results" to "Results",
  • "General Competitions" to "General",
  • "Members Only Competitions" to "Members Only",
  • "Open Competitions" to "Open",
  • "NAWG festivals" to "NAWGFest",
  • "Wentworth Weekend" to "Wentworth".

  Changed some corresponding article titles as well.

• Where appropriate, staff names have been replaced with role names. For example: "Kevin Machin" has been replaced with "Web Administrator". This is to reduce future editing work when staff changes occur.

• Added publication dates and submissions deadlines for Link magazine.

• Changed all instances of "Warwick University" to "University of Warwick".

• Changed category name "Web Site" to "Website", along with the description.

• Replaced the "Berforts" advert with a "CMP" one, since Berforts have gone into administration.
• Created the basic framework for the website plans documentation. The overview article is the starting point. Navigation is defined in the document structure article. Alternatively, you can use the "plans" tag.

• Tidied up The Write Path anthology articles:

  • Their availability status has been brought up to date.
  • Their layout and styling have been made consistent.
  • They now share content with a new article that summarises the availability and prices of all the anthology editions.

• Removed the following widgets from the "writing groups" area in the side bar:

  • "list updates", relating to article 307 which has now been removed.
  • "not on the list?", relating to article 310 which has now been removed.

  Note that these were only shown when "writing groups" categories are displayed.

• Changed several articles to reflect staff changes. E-mail address relays were also changed accordingly.
• Changed several articles so that phrases like "associate member" have become "individual member".

Reorganised the competitions area:

• Merged winners and results articles into a single "Results" category.
• Renamed "NAWG Competitions" as "Members Only".
• Renamed "Open Competitions" as "Open".
• Added "General" category for competitions not organised by the NAWG committee. Reorganised articles accordingly.
• Some of the competition related articles that were only in the "Group News" category, have now been added to the "Competitions/General" category.
• Changed the slug for the “100” competition to "mini-tales", due to technical issues with numeric slugs.

• Swapped positions for "categories" and "pages" widgets. This makes the categories a bit easier to get to.

• Removed the "polls" widget.
• Changed "categories" widget from drop-down list to ordinary list.

Removed all attachments from the database. Attachments are not currently used for media, for a number of reasons, including:

• The user interface is awkward to use, at best. Uploading is a bit hit-and-miss.
• The file naming convention is messy and cannot easily be policed.
• Images get manipulated, without the possibility of user choice. This includes:
  • Multiple copies in different sizes, whether required or not, all resized and compressed.
  • No control over file names.
• The relationships between articles and their attachments is rather poorly designed and implemented.

Perhaps a later version of WordPress will change things, but for the time being, attachments are of no particular use, given we have direct FTP access for media uploads.

The permalink structure has been changed to: /%post_id%/

Despite many arguments in favour of "pretty" URLs, there is one major flaw in most of the permalink options: they are not permanent.

I could write a whole article on why, but here's a summary of the reasons:

• Article titles can and do change. Reasons vary, from simple typo corrections to other cosmetic or operational considerations.
• Categories, tags and other taxonomies are not suitable for permalinks, because:
  • Their names and URL slugs may change.
  • Articles can and do have more than one term associated with them.
• Temporally based permalinks make no sense. Who cares when an article was posted? We have archives for that. In any case, dates may be adjusted, e.g. to bring an article nearer to the top of a list.
• Author based permalinks have similar issues. Authors may change their names for a variety of reasons. Articles' authors may be altered for operational reasons.

In short, the only aspect about an article that is permanent, is its unique identifier – the ID number.

• A new advert tag has been added, to help identify articles which are advertisements, either paid ones or free ones.

• The breadcrumb trail for navigation now uses diamonds as separators, rather than greater than symbols. For example:

  Home ♦ Category ♦ Sub-category ♦ Article

  Rather than:

  Home > Category > Sub-category > Article

The Writing Groups Directory has been overhauled. In particular:

• All the out-of-date groups information has been removed.
• A full listing of all groups has been put in its place, derived from the membership database.
• The information about NAWG personnel has been moved into the "Who is NAWG" category.

• Created new category Wentworth Weekend and moved related articles there. The articles were tidied up along the way.
• All previous years' brochures and booking forms for the Festival of Writing are now stored in WCONT_HOME/doc/event/. Only the current ones are downloadable, but the others are there as an archive.

• Added a panel for "Writing Group News".
• Rearranged panels and aligned them vertically.

• All events images have now been reorganised, along with book covers and adverts.

The images for the site have been filed in a rather haphazard manner, including the following issues:

• Multiple and ad-hoc locations, including:
  • WCONT_HOME/uploads
  • images
  • images/2011
  • images/extra
• No particular naming convention, resulting in some confusing and misleading image file names, e.g:
  • Gem-Street-cover-383x619-20150x150.jpg
  • Advert-for-NAWG-2.jpg
• Duplicate images with different file names.
• Unnecessary images that are not referenced anywhere on the site.

Work is now underway to tidy this up, using the following principles:

1. One directory tree for images, e.g.
   • /WCONT_HOME/img
   • /WCONT_HOME/img/book
   • /WCONT_HOME/img/comp
2. Consistent naming convention, including:
   1. All lower case ASCII characters.
   2. No numeric sizes nor dates in file names.
   3. Use names that collate into a sensible order, to make things easier to find.
3. Only upload files that are actually needed.

So far, the images for the books area and the 2011 Festival of Writing have been reorganised.

Further work on the Link magazine area:

• All magazines now reside in the same directory and have a consistent file naming convention:

  WCONT_HOME/doc/link/nawg.link.yymm.pdf

  where yy is the year and mm is the month of publication.

• The back issues list has been accordingly adjusted. It is also now a separate article from the Link information one.

• Many (but not yet all) articles with the word LINK hard-coded in upper case, have been altered so that the following code is used instead:

  <em class="mag-link">Link</em>

  This should ensure:

  1. Consistency.
  2. The ability to apply styles (including capitalisation) without further article editing.

The writers' "group news" area had been reorganised.

What used to be a very long and unwieldy document, is now a new category where writer's groups can get articles and adverts put up.

The page itself has had a makeover and now includes details of how to advertise on the site and in Link magazine, in addition to listing the groups' news articles.

The open competitions area has been reorganised.

• Competitions are now detailed in separate articles. One each.
• The summary now has a table of links to these articles.

The Link area has been tidied up.

• Duplicated editorial policy information has now been replaced by links to the editorial policy page.
• Links to back issues of Link magazine are now presented in tables. One table per year. Easier to find.
• The short story Unexpected News, previously uncategorised, has been moved into the Link category.
• Article excerpts have been added.

The books area has been reorganised. This will save a great deal of searching and scrolling.

• There is now one book per article (mostly). Easier to locate; easier to edit.
• Tags are used for certain books. For example:
  • Anthologies and collections are tagged "anthology".
  • Books published by NAWG are tagged "NAWG Publications".
  • Books containing poetry are tagged "poetry".

As there are now quite a lot more articles, the number displayed per page (when not viewing in single article mode) has been increased from 10 to 20.

Re-organised the panels on the front page:

• Merged the two "NAWG Open Festival of Writing" panels and the "Events" panel into a single one with the title "NAWG Open Festival of Writing & Other Events".
• Changed the images on the new panel and on the "Competitions" panel. The events panel now has a "group" image and the competitions panel has the "pen nib" image.
• Added a new "Publications" panel to list articles in that category.
• Moved the "Friends of NAWG" panel into the left-hand column.

Added links to other sites, including connections to social media.

• A "links to other sites" widget has been added to the side bar, just below the "NAWG details" panel.
• The "categories" list in the side bar is now rendered as a drop-down list, in order to save vertical space.

The site map area is no longer displayed.

• The "categories" and "pages" panels have been removed from the site map. The site map is now empty and is therefore no longer displayed.
• An "archives" widget has been added to the side bar, just below the "categories" list. This and the "pages" list are now rendered as drop-down lists, in order to save vertical space.

• A "recent comments" widget has been added to the side bar, just below the "recent articles" widget.

Further rearrangements associated with phasing out the site map area:

• The "recent articles" list has been moved out of the site map area and is now shown in the side bar, just below the "Polls" widget.
• The "latest updates" panel on the front page has been removed, since this information is duplicated in the "recent articles" side bar widget.
• This made some space on the front page, so the other front page panels have been rearranged to take advantage of this.

The "site map" area is redundant, since the information it contains is repeated elsewhere. For this reason, it is being phased out. Accordingly, the positions of some of the information panels is changing, starting with:

• The "NAWG details" panel has been moved out of the site map area and is now shown in the side bar, just above the Berforts advert.

We decided to adopt the evolutionary changeover deployment strategy. See the deployment strategy document for more details.

Release 2.4.1 of the live site was deployed. This was a technical upgrade in preparation for later changes. No significant visual nor functional changes were applied.

Went back to having separate databases for the two sites. This is so that different display themes can be used on each site, something not possible with a shared database.

We will endeavour to synchronise them on a weekly basis.

• Made the home page display the "test site" information.

  Note that on the live site, we'll replace this with something else (to be designed).

• Made a separate "all posts" page to list every post.

• The comments submit/reply form was implemented.

• Comments now displayed in a nested manner, to reflect their threaded (hierarchical) organisation.

• Moved article navigation bar into the footer display frame.
• Article titles can now be clicked, to display the selected one on a single page.
• Articles now each have an "info" area after the main content, showing the author, posting date, and categories. These include links so that, for example, users can click to see articles by a particular author or in a particular category.

A feature whereby long lists of articles^* can be displayed in a compact, tabular form. This will make locating an article of interest an easier process.

* Long lists can be generated when, for example, popular categories are selected.

Data from the live site were imported to this test site. Some notable points to observe:

• This is still a test site, changes made here will not have any effect on the live site (nor vice-versa).
• Images and attachments have not been imported, therefore much content will be missing.
• A great many of the links in the articles will be broken. Do not panic. Remember, this is only a test site.