Patch Notes #2
So much has changed that it might be easier to just say: After the last patch notes I went through a bunch of trials to get the site faster. This had to be priority number 1. No one was going to stick around a site that took 7 seconds to load every page. To that end:
Site Deletion, New Plugins
I basically nuked every plugin we had and started from scratch. No more buddypress, no more event manager, no more youzer, no more 8 different notification plugins, no more TAY bucks (gone too soon!), no more WP Bakery page editor or GP-review plugin, no more slider plugin, no more aardvark theme.
Currently we are running the following plugins:
- WP-Polls: Create polls. I figured this one had to stay at LEAST until the game of the year post.
- 1 Click Accessibility: Upon creating the site from scratch one of the main things I wanted to stress was accessibility. Who was welcome on TAY? Everyone, and that includes those with visual impairments. The site was designed to have large readable font by default with high contrast. The button in the top right gives further option to customize options as you see fit.
- Elementor and Elementor Pro: Yay! They’re back! These are very visual post creation tools with many more blocks than standard wordpress. Take a look today!
- Hide Admin Bar: I hate that I need a plugin for this. No one wants you admin bar. Go away. I made sure that all functionality from the admin bar was in the “User” menu.
- WP File Manager: Easy site backups! No more worrying that I will accidentally delete the whole site somehow.
- Two more: PeepSo and Yoast I want to discuss separately
For a theme I researched the consistently fastest, most customizable theme. I landed on GeneratePress Premium which is what we’re currently running. It’s been good to me so far.
With all of these changes, you may have noticed site speed has improved amazingly. It rarely takes more than a second or two to load pages!
Yoast
Yoast is an SEO plugin that will help TAY2 be found by people looking for what we’re offering. It doesn’t work if you don’t pay attention to it when creating posts. This is all completely optional, but if everyone is vigilant about this, it can help us grow in the long run.
Scroll down in the classic editor and under the text box where you enter your content is some data you can enter to help search engines find our site. It’s all straight forward prompting and doesn’t take more than a minute or two.
PeepSo, BuddyPress replacement
I have a vision of TAY2. In it, we use Discord, the Blog, and the social media aspect of TAY2 to create a thriving community filled with events, content posts, groups, and more. I am adamant that we at least need some sort of social media aspect to the site. Whether we use it in a limited fashion or move to full adoption as more people see what there is to offer, I’m indifferent to right now. I just want something THERE. We can figure out what to use it for later (currently making Trivia group for anyone who has signed up for the event).
What does PeepSo offer us (at no sacrifice made to site speed):
- Profiles
- Groups
- Polls (in your feed only)
- Giphy Integration
- Chat (yeah, we actually have chat! Go to a profile and click the little mail icon)
- Friends
- Activity Stream (facebook wall)
- Reactions (go ahead and like that post or tell someone you thought it was funny)
- Blog integration to the activity stream
- Notifications (FINALLY! They’re customizable how you want to be notified and for what. If you find you’re getting too many notifications, go to your notification settings in your profile page and change it.
- Autofriends (hahahah I’m Tom now! My life’s goal is complete)
- Word Filter: Yeah, I’m not so sure. I put in our About Us section we’re 13+ friendly. I don’t need to censor “damn”
- Social Log ins: You may have noticed that you can login using Discord, Steam, or Twitter. Neat!
- More
Really there are too many features to go over but PeepSo makes it so you can use TAY2 like other social media services if you want. Just switch to Social Feed view under the User menu if you’re interested.
Layout
I’ll be working on this more as time goes on. The layout is OK but is very …2005 Apple to me. I’m not a web designer (obviously), so please let me know what you think we can do to switch from “cards” to something else. Or if your passions is web design and you wanna take a crack at writing some css or something.
Footer
I’ve added a lot of information to the footer. You can see the Discord link, our twitter, and YouTube links as well as some pages regarding our privacy policy. Finally we have an about us and a contact us which is barebones and I need to update to be a form.
Going Forward
Now that we got the site speed where I want it, I’m going to start looking into ways we can maybe cooperate with other small sites to do cross promotional events. If you know of any smaller community sites that might wanna do something like a trivia challenge, or some sort of streaming for charity challenge or anything of the like, let me know please. Or reach out to them yourself! Organize something, it’s your site too!
Get involved!
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