Site Maintenance

About the Development of the Skaneateles 9-Element Plan Website

This site is assembled and maintained using WordPress as the CMS (Content Management System). As the most popular website-development program, online resources and communities are extensive, and are often a great help in development. While this popularity makes WordPress a target of hackers, the massive community of contributors works to keep security in the forefront, and there are as well many plugins devoted to increased site security. It is notable that many large institutions (including government) and corporations trust WordPress, emphasizing the seriousness of WordPress’s developers and contributors when it comes to security.

WordPress uses MariaDB (formerly MySQL), a free, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS).

Using WordPress as a CMS

All areas of the site can be maintained through the WordPress maintenance interface. Since the options available are numerous, maintenance by anyone other than the webmaster has been simplified to include only what is needed for day-to-day maintenance, such as modifying text and adding or deleting pages, events, documents, and links.

While originally conceived as a blogging platform, the modular nature of WordPress’s programming allows website developers and programmers to create specialized plugins extending the functionality of WordPress, covering the gamut of possible websites, from straight-up blogs to portfolios to large institutional websites. Other CMS systems exist that compete with WordPress, but the overall simplicity of the WordPress platform has placed it as the leader in this arena; more websites are built with a WordPress back end than the next two most popular platforms combined. It (like its competitors) is free to download and use for creating a website; the only costs are the hosting and any specialized plugins that charge for use.

Site Administration

Administration of the site—adding, editing and deleting users, posts, pages, and images and other media. Specialized content is managed by plugins that operate within the WordPress interface. Except for some plugins that include some promotional material, such as advertising the “pro” version or the like (extended functionality that is usually beyond what we require) or soliciting donations (for free or free versions of plugins), the functionality is fully integrated within the WordPress Environment and appear within the administration navigation.

To simplify administration for users focused on adding and managing content, a plugin to manage the back-end navigation by user has been used. As the illustrations show, the full administrative navigation can be daunting event to the top-level administrator. A simplified navigation menu for editors and content contributors that is focused on necessary administrative tasks will make maintenance easier.

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