[Volunteers_fosm] FOSM Website

[Joseph C. Giles]

I’ve had a lot of fun the past couple of years since I took over maintenance of the FOSM website <https://friendsofthesandias.org/> created by Mike Coltrin several years earlier. (Thanks again, Mike!) I volunteered to do so with my only expertise being creating family history webpages. I quickly realized that my hobby was of little applicability as I had to learn an entirely different authoring system: WordPress, which utilizes hundreds of third-party tools called Themes and Plugins. 

I received a warning a couple of weeks ago from GoDaddy, the company that hosts our site, that it must be upgraded from hypertext preprocessor PHP version 7.4 to 8.0 by July 26. Unfortunately, the theme I chose, while providing a very attractive format, turned out to be a one-man (living in Germany) creation that is not (yet) compatible with this update. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying out alternative themes, and I found one that comes highly recommended and made conversion very easy while providing a similar look and feel as the old theme. There are some pluses and minuses, however.

+ The new theme provides a search icon (a small magnifying glass) in the header that can be used to look for names, organizations, etc. throughout the site.
+- The new theme allows for different customization of desktop and mobile (phone and tablet) displays.
+ The new theme allows for a “sticky” header that remains visible as you scroll down a page.
- The new theme doesn’t show the itemized menu in mobile displays but rather a “hamburger” icon (three horizontal lines) at the right of the header that you must click on to see the menu. 
- The sticky header takes up too much room on mobile displays.
- I haven’t (so far) been able to get submenus to display on the mobile version although I’ve followed the instructions I found. This should not be a problem because I always include links to the lower-level pages on the top-level page of a menu item.

Although I still have much to learn about the new theme, I converted the “production” site today because I was getting tired of adding new content to both the production and staging sites. I welcome your comments and suggestions.

Cliff
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