Operational updates

Know issues with SiteWorks production sites along with items of technical interest will be posted here with the most recent first.

2024 May 4th

SiteWorks plugins 1.1 being deployed

WordPress 6.5 along with updated u3a SiteWorks plugins with new features started automatic deployment to SiteWorks hosted sites on 4th May.

At the editing/display level there are some nice plugin enhancements. Please note that there have been no changes to current behaviour – what you do now will continue to work.

Here are the summaries. The User Guide also documents these new features.

• Using the u3a groups list block: When displaying the group list you can show or hide items such as status, time, and venue.  Groups can be displayed in alphabetical order by vertical columns or horizontally across the page. Events can be multi-category and filtered by category.
• Using the u3a events block: Can now show previous or future events in ascending or descending order.  They can be displayed by category, show a specified number of events, or events taking place over a specified number of days. Group events from this page can be turned on/off without having to go to u3a settings.
  There are more layout choices.  An image can be displayed alongside the text of your event.  You can add a colour to the background grid of each event.  When setting up an event you can now choose the end time as well as the start time.
• A new WordPress feature for buttons is the ability to apply a drop shadow.  u3a code has been added that enables the shadow to be one of several pre-set colours/ weights/ styles that complement the u3a branding colours.  This feature is available for similar blocks such as columns and images.
• An additional u3a plugin called Contact Form log is available and turning it on or off is controlled by the site Admin. The Contact Form log records all mail sent from contact forms across the site. This data is stored for 90 days, so if this feature is enabled on your site you need to make a small change to your u3a Privacy policy to reflect this.
  The u3a contact form has a field which is invisible to a human that a ‘bot’ will fill in. If your site is being targeted by automated bots the completed hidden field will appear in the log entries.

Note that LightSpeed Cache still needs to be disabled.

Google search results

We are aware that when searching (Google only) for a u3a site then the search result site name for the SiteWorks site shows Chesterfield u3a. The team are working on resolving this but it’s proving evasive. We are currently testing using ‘Website structured data’ on one of our sites.
In the mean time other search sites are available.

2024 April 29th

LightSpeed Cache still needs to be disabled as its use will result in problems using the contact form. An update to the contact form plugin to fix this is currently with our testing team.

Changing Settings. A reminder from the Operational Procedures to not change the following settings as doing so can compromise administration support.

Storing backups. Each SiteWorks production site is backed up daily. If you feel the need to do additional backups then make sure they are NOT stored on the SiteWorks server and are stored elsewhere.