NOTE: As of ~7/25/21 — in accordance with Area 10 Convention Guidelines, the decision as to whether to utilize a convention website and how that website is to be built (e.g. whether or not to use a WordPress platform, how payments are processed, etc.) are left to each Convention committee. While there are suggestions about the website and a growing body of experience, there still seems to be a high degree of variability and exercise of autonomy between convention committees and their Committee Chairs and Convention Web Chairs. Some have offered suggestions as to how to improve or change processes and decisions regarding developing and maintaining convention websites but, to date, there have been no Area 10 actions on this.

NOTE: Includes suggestions from Stewart as of 09/29/22 —

Following is the general process used for about the past 4-5 Convention Committee rotations to set up and launch the Area 10 (Colorado) Convention Website used for the promotion and registration of the convention. An overview is as follows:

1. Create a “seed” for the new convention website (this is usually a copy of the previous year’s website)
2. Launch that seed Website in a “sandbox” area for development
3. On the Saturday evening of the Convention, move the existing convention site to a place where it will not be the public facing website (should still generally be operational should the last year’s convention committee need to get information from the registrations)
4. The fully developed, tested, new website is copied from the sandbox into the production website and made active (accepting “real” registrations and credit card transactions are turned on)
5. Verify that the new site is working as desired

Presumptions:

1. There is a WordPress admin login (usually coaa-admin2) on all sites which is assigned to the Area 10 webchair  – recommended in case there is maintenance required on the hosting service which is maintained by the Area 10 webchair
2. The initial site setup is being done by the Area 10 webchair (or designate) who will have at least Cpanel (hosting admin tools) access to the webhost (as of 7/21, this is hostmonster.com).
3. Costs for any special plugins, themes or other charges will be born by the Convention Committee in their budget
4. The convention will need to set up a Stripe.com account which links to their bank account. From that setup, you will get software keys for both “live” and “test” interfaces to the Stripe API.

Detailed steps are as follows (to simplify explanations, we are presuming that the 2022 convention is the new site and the 2021 convention is the current year convention).

1. Set up “sandbox” for the 2022 convention
   1. determine the “seed” to be used (for our example, the 2021 convention)
   2. login as admin on the 2021 site and make a copy of the site (we’ve used the “Duplicator” plugin to do this in recent years)
   3. download this package (installer and backup file) to your computer
   4. create a new directory 2022 on the webhost under ~www/convention-sandbox/
   5. upload the package (installer and backup file) to this new directory
   6. using Hostmonster Cpanel, create a database and privileged database username and password associated with that database
      1. chose a name (limited to ~8 characters)  which would give some idea as to what it contains like “cv22sb”
      2. record the name, username and password
         1. note that on Hostmonster (and some other hosts?), there will be a prefix added to your names so that cv22sb is actually an external name of coloraj1_cv22sb
   7. Run the installer uploaded above by entering the URL of:
      https://coloradoaa.org/convention-sandbox/2022/installer.php (note that the name “installer” might be different from your installation in that, if you’ve downloaded other backups, it might be actually named something like installer(2).php)
      1. when prompted, enter the database information (DB name, DB user name, DB user password) created above
      2. test that there is connectivity to the database via the installer script
      3. when prompted for the site name, rename it to “TEST – 2022 Area 10 Convention”
   8. Upon successful install:
      1. login at:
         https://coloradoaa.org/convention-sandbox/2022/wp-admin
         to the coaa-admin2 account and complete initial setup and remove the install scripts
      2. delete all entries in the registration database
      3. make sure the registration plugin points to the proper Stripe account (or is at least disabled from the 2021 Stripe account)
      4. delete all user accounts
      5. Create a new admin user account for the 2022 Convention webchair
   9. Pass credentials to the 2022 convention webchair and fix anything that might be broken…
2. On the Saturday night at the Convention
   1. log into the current convention website at:
      https://coloradoaa.org/convention-sandbox/2021/wp-admin
      as coaa-admin2 account
   2. create a new Duplicator (backup) package
   3. Download that package (installer and backup) to your computer
   4. create a new directory 2021 on the webhost under ~www/convention-old/
   5. upload the package (installer and backup file) to this new directory
   6. using Hostmonster Cpanel, create a database and privileged database username and password associated with that database
      1. chose a name (limited to ~8 characters)  which would give some idea as to what it contains like “cv21old”
      2. record the name, username and password
         1. note that on Hostmonster (and some other hosts?), there will be a prefix added to your names so that cv21old is actually an external name of coloraj1_cv21old
   7. Run the installer uploaded above by entering the URL of:
      https://coloradoaa.org/convention-old/2021/installer.php (note that the name “installer” might be different from your installation in that, if you’ve downloaded other backups, it might be actually named something like installer(2).php)
      1. when prompted, enter the database information (DB name, DB user name, DB user password) created above
      2. test that there is connectivity to the database via the installer script
      3. when prompted for the site name, rename it to “OLD – 2021 Area 10 Convention”
   8. Log into the old site as coaa-admin2 at:
      https://coloradoaa.org/convention-old/2021/wp-admin
      1. insure that all seems sane (can get access to old registration records, etc.)
      2. make sure that there is no “live” access to Stripe for charging credit cards
   9. Using Cpanel, move the directory from ~www/convention to ~www/convention-2021-SAVE
   10. Create a new directory ~www/convention
   11. Log in as coaa-admin2 to the 2022 sandbox site at:
       https://coloradoaa.org/convention-sandbox/2022
   12. create a new Duplicator (backup) package
   13. Download that package (installer and backup) to your computer
   14. upload the package (installer and backup file) to the directory ~www/convention
   15. using Hostmonster Cpanel, create a database and privileged database username and password associated with that database
       1. chose a name (limited to ~8 characters)  which would give some idea as to what it contains like “cv22”
       2. record the name, username and password
          1. note that on Hostmonster (and some other hosts?), there will be a prefix added to your names so that cv22 is actually an external name of coloraj1_cv22
   16. Run the installer uploaded above by entering the URL of:
       https://coloradoaa.org/convention/installer.php (note that the name “installer” might be different from your installation in that, if you’ve downloaded other backups, it might be actually named something like installer(2).php)
       1. when prompted, enter the database information (DB name, DB user name, DB user password) created above
       2. test that there is connectivity to the database via the installer script
       3. when prompted for the site name, rename it to “2022 Area 10 Convention”
   17. Presuming success, log in as coaa-admin2 to:
       https://convention.coloradoaa.org/wp-admin
       1. in order for this to work, you may need to do a “hard refresh” on your browser. On Chrome, this is a CTRL/CMD+Shift+R.
       2. sometimes, the host will also need to flush it’s cache (sometimes takes a few minutes)
       3. make sure you’re looking at the  new (2022) website
       4. Check for initial sanity
   18. Turn over to the 2022 Convention Website Chair to make sure all links are working and that registration works
   19. Verify that Stripe account is linking and Credit Cards are getting processed
3. Depending on committee and convention webchair preferences, they may or may not want to keep their sandbox live for an active convention website should they want to test or do additional development
4. It’s recommended that the Area 10 webchair keep copies of all packages for at least a few months in case there is a disaster or a hack. As the site is used for the active convention, there are a few recommendations to the convention committee:
   1. Maintain the admin account of coaa-admin2 on the site. Should you find the need to reset the password on that account, make sure the Area 10 webchair is given the new password.
   2. The convention webchair is responsible for all security and backups on the convention web account. Please make at least monthly backups (especially when registrations are more active toward the time of the convention).