Lots of invisible changes. We have moved site hosting from SiteGround to Cloudways due to cost increase at SG. I had initially hoped to host in an “end user” account at DreamHost but lack of staging capability and general slowness were non-starters. So we are once again in a site targeted toward a reseller. So my GCS, LLC is the owner of the account. Scott has access to the “STA” project in Cloudways in case I get :”hit by a bus”. Cloudways has some nice tuning options, and a reasonable staging area. Cost is $10/month that will be a pass-thru to St. Andrews. We might need to up the virtual server power as we expand usage, but additional cost should be minimal. Also, I prototyped our site running on a Ubuntu / WordPress VM install and that is an option, potentially on a host located at the church to reduce costs.
New site had Google Analytics integrated under the infotech@standrewspcusa.org account. Access to the analytics page has been granted to members of the DPT. Lila has taken on the role of Social Media Coordinator for use – yay!
The Staging site has been deployed. Here are the instructions I send to Lila. They can serve as the basis of a how-to for others.
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The staging site is a mirror copy of the production site as of the time the staging site is created, or the last refresh. I am refreshing now so that your user on production should be mirrored to staging.
The staging site is protected by a username / password as we don’t want people or bots contacting it. The staging site also comes up with a strange looking URL, so I create an alias named “staging.standrewspcusa.org” that I update to whatever the current staging site is.
https://staging.standrewspcusa.org/
you should see a login request. Enter the username “sanctuary” and password “4575Auhay”
Once you are logged in the URL will change to the current staging one but the site should act just like our prod site. Just append “openthedoor” to the URL and you should get the wordpress login, like in the screenshot below. I often use Firefox when testing stuff rather than my usual Chrome profile.
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Kirk