Hi Ian (& Len & Kevin),
You can copy-paste over whatever content you want of course, but this is using GeneratePress as the theme and has a slightly different selection of plugins, so let me give you a bit of a brain-dump on what’s what.
Block editor: in recent versions of WordPress, the main page/post editing experience has moved to using a thing called the “Block Editor” (formerly known as “Project Gutenberg”). Get an intro at https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/ . NB that documentation is referencing some features which will be released in about 2 weeks time, so if you can’t find a thing mentioned there then that might be why.
I have completed the initial chunk of setup and testing work to configure WordPress on a new server so it is ready for you to play with and try to set up a new site for MDVGA.
GeneratePress is a theme for WordPress that replaces the Nexus Themes’ golf theme used by the MDVGA site right now – it is a lot faster and so far I have not managed to break it. It relies heavily on WordPress’s standard “Customizer” to configure itself (what you see when you go to Appearance > Themes > GeneratePress > Customize), which is a sidebar on the left of the page that lets you tweak the site and usually see the changes live (and then you hit Publish in the customizer to actually make your changes visible to others, which somewhat prevents people from seeing the site in an in-between stage). Menus are created using WordPress’s built-in menu support. Fonts and colors are mostly configured in the customizer, though you can override in a few places if you want. GeneratePress has about a million options and I have purchased the premium plugins to go with it; I highly recommend watching the videos at https://generatepress.com/premium/ (not just the big one at the top but also all the Video Overviews for the premium modules) to get an understanding of what you can do. There is also a lot of documentation at https://docs.generatepress.com/ (though it can be hard to find exactly what’s what) and finally if you search on Google then you can usually come across a thread in their forum which answers specific things (“generatepress change mobile menu logo”). A key thing is that you need to enable the modules you want over at Appearance > GeneratePress – otherwise the premium modules will be disabled to improve performance (each module/plugin slows down WordPress a bit, typically).
For page content itself, you are used to using NexusThemes’s “SiteBuilder” to configure things; you should instead use WordPress’s Block editor to get the job done. To help out, I’ve installed the GenerateBlock plugin (from the same folks as GeneratePress), which lets you do some more advanced layouts if you need to. Watch the video at https://generateblocks.com/ to get a taste and read the docs at https://docs.generateblocks.com/
It’s often hard to get started with an empty canvas, so GeneratePress has a “site library“, which is essentially pre-made sites that you can import and then tweak: https://generatepress.com/site-library/ . They are also good for learning how things work. I have set up https://example-cms.golfbookingsite.com/ to show a little of what can be done tweaking an existing site, and I have preloaded a site that’s fairly similar into the MDVGA site as well as another one into a sandbox site (more on this below). You may not be able to import sites yourself since they often come with plugins (and for security, you do not have the ability to install plugins), but if you’d prefer me to wipe the site that’s set up for MDVGA and replace it with another template then just let me know and I’ll do that. Just be aware that doing this wipes out all customizations made so far (but not page/post content, it seems).
Your site is at https://mdvga-cms.golfbookingsite.com/ and you can log in to it at https://mdvga-cms.golfbookingsite.com/login . Once you have set it up sufficiently I will move it to www.mdvetgolf.org – however I will need Andrew’s help to update the domains. You should receive login credentials to your emails in the next 15 minutes or so. (In the future I expect that you will be able to share login credentials between wordpress and the booking system but that is not implemented yet.)
Because this is a “multisite” (aka “network”) WordPress install, your same username and password will also let you access a “Golf Sandbox” WordPress site using a dropdown menu on the top left; here’s a quick video demo I made: https://youtu.be/iHJXSu57hj8 . Each “site” in a multisite setup has its own posts and pages and menus and theme setups etc. Each site can have different plugins enabled (and while you can’t install new plugins, you can choose which already-installed plugins you want to have enabled). So you should treat this sandbox site as disposable – feel free to mess with it as much as you want, try things out, etc – the idea is this replaces your staging site. Other associations will also have access to it, so don’t put anything important there.
To further improve performance, this site is set up to cache at several different levels. Basically this means that “views” of your site are saved in different places to avoid having to regenerate the site from scratch each time someone looks at your site. Mostly this “just works” but you may manage to make some changes but then not see them reflected on the actual site, so here’s how to work around that:
- JavaScript and CSS content is bundled together using Autoptimize . You can use the Autoptimize > Delete Cache menu on the top bar of the site to clear this cache.
- SuperCache saves copies of each page. To clear this cache, click Delete Cache on the top menu bar.
- Cloudflare serves copies of your site from servers that are closer to you and your members. You can’t easily clear this right now but just bug me if you think it might be a problem. (We’ll probably have to turn this off once we move your site to your domain anyway, unless Andrew wants to jump through a bunch more hoops.)
Finally, here are other plugins which you can use if you want:
- Enhanced Media Library – lets you organize your media uploads, but it’s free unlike your existing media library plugin (which also means it’s not a security risk as the current one is everytime your license for it expires).
- Google Analytics Dashboard for WP – same analytics dashboard plugin as you have right now, but not yet configured for you. I’ll set this up when we move your site to www.mdvetgolf.org
- Lightweight Social Icons – you mentioned wanting to lean into Facebook, so this lets you add Facebook icons easily wherever you want.
- Ninja Forms – so you can set up a contact form. This has a million paid plugins but they are quite expensive and your needs should be satisfied by the free version I think. If it falls short I would probably prefer to try other plugins rather than pay for this, but just try this first. You can see it in action at golfbookingsite.com/
- Shortcodes Ultimate – Shortcodes are a built-in WordPress feature that lets you write things like [ninja_form id=1] (for Ninja Forms) in posts and pages to embed content – they were basically the way to get fancy layouts before the Block Editor. Shortcodes Ultimate is a plugin that adds a bunch more shortcodes for you to use.
- The Events Calendar – a replacement for the paid calendar you have right now
- TinyMCE Advanced – adds a bunch more text formatting options to blocks. I’ve kept this deactivated for you because if you don’t use these features then your site will look nicer, but you can turn it on if you want it.
- WP Show Posts – lets you define lists of recent posts and then embed those lists into pages if you want. For example this is how you would display all the match reports in one place: put the match reports blog posts into a new Match Reports category and create a Post List that shows posts with Taxonomy set to Category and Category set to Match Reports
Finally, unlike the current site, this site is secured with SSL/TLS – basically that means that you’ll see a padlock icon instead of a warning when you go to log in, and means that your login credentials can’t be stolen. This used to be quite expensive to do but these days if you’re technical you can do it for free, so that’s nice.
And lastly, I will be (attempting to be) moving internationally from San Francisco back to (Western) Australia again in late August, during which I’ll have to undergo 2x 2 weeks of quarantine in a hotel. So it’d be best to aim to have the new MDVGA site go live under www.mdvetgolf.org in October, since September is probably a writeoff for me and you will probably need a week or two to set up the new MDVGA site. That said, I should be able to answer questions between now and October (though I might be slower to respond in September).
Alright, end of my novel! Let me know what questions you have.