Welcome! This repository hosts the content for the website of the Cactus and Succulent Society of San Jose, a.k.a. the CSSSJ. Our hope is that, just as with the plants we love, a little attention and love will have it thriving.
For the time being, this repository will have two principal branches, master
and dev. The content of master will live in csssj.org, while the dev
branch will be deployed to dev.csssj.org.
At present, those deployments will be manual: that is, someone will have to log into
the host system, go into the directory corresponding to the site, and perform a
git pull. If our updates ever become voluminous enough to make that tedious
and/or cumbersome, we'll revisit that approach and see about automating it.
Here are the things I'd like to do in the near future. There will very likely be some overlap between different phases. (In particular, between Phase 3 and its neighbors.)
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Phase 1: Culling
There seem to be a number of files on the inherited site that, when they outlived their usefulness, were simply renamed. We should scan the HTML files, collect the names of the files they refer to, and remove the rest.
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Phase 2: Content Organization
It also seems that many files, notably gifs, were stored in the top-level directory. We should devise a scheme for grouping files. This might be by type (e.g.
photos) or by intended use (e.g.public_docs, for flyers and other documents that we encourage visitors and members to download and print). -
Phase 3: URL Schema
Right now, to take one example, the informational Show and Sale page for non-members resides in
show-and-sale. What do we do when the Show and Sale is over? It seems like we should archive that page, so that people can look back through history. Maybe we should come up with an organization that lets us incorporate the date into the URL from the beginning, and use internal symlinks to provide shortcuts. -
Phase 4: Overhaul
This is where we dig into and revise the appearance and organization of the site. It will involve, among other things, more generous use of photos. It will also to involve the use of modern tools to generate "responsive" pages, and to generate new pages from templates.
My current plan is to use a combination of Bootstrap and Hugo for much of the heavy lifting: Bootstrap for flexible control of page layout, and Hugo to help uniformly apply navbars, styling, and the like.
Last but certainly not least, it's going to require the skill of designers to pick the colors, typography, and layout that please the eye.
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Phase 5: ???
Assuming we get all of those, y'know, trivial little tasks out of the way, we can start to think about future expansion, like the long-sought store that lets people register and pay for their membership on-line.