About this website

WordPress and LAMP

The purpose of this section is to satisfy the curiosity of anyone who would like to know more about how The Helford River Sailing Club website works.

The HRSC website is constructed using WordPress, an Open Source publishing platform that relies upon a scripting language called PHP and uses a MySQL database.  The site is hosted at 1and1.co.uk on a Linux platform with an Apache server.  This combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, often referred to as LAMP, is the preferred choice of web developers who prefer to keep out of the clutches of Microsoft and use ‘open source’, and therefore free, solutions.

WordPress is primarily a blogging system but it can be quite readily adapted to content management by using an appropriately constructed theme and some well chosen plugins. The WordPress theme system allows a developer to create custom page templates and stylesheets that determine how the site operates and how it looks, all without modifying the core of the system.  Our theme is based on Kadence. A child theme is used to allow customisation.

Pages, Posts and Categories

WordPress makes a distinction between pages, which are intended for the relatively static parts of a website, and posts, which are dated and intended as news items. Posts must be assigned to a category and are usually shown in reverse date order with the most recently filed posts at the top.

Our pages are assembled within the editor using columns; heading and text blocks, and post blocks showing posts from a particular category. The latter are reusable blocks used on more than one page. These can be edited wherever they appear. Documents for download are also added in reusable blocks.

Images and Galleries

Images can be added individually within the content or grouped in galleries. Captions may also be added. The Advanced Gallery block is recommended for maximum flexibility in display, linking and captions. Images can be linked to Media file to open in a lightbox, or Custom URL to link to another page or an external website. In the latter case please choose ‘Open in a new tab’.

Events

Events are a custom post type allowing the addition of date and time information. These are shown on the front page in upcoming date order and are automatically removed when the event has occurred.

Reusable Blocks

Reusable blocks allow content to be used on multiple pages. The content can be edited under Blocks in the admin sidebar or on any page where the block is used.

Header and Footer

The site header template contains the title banner; the menu bar, and a full width image slider. A featured image added to an individual page will replace the slider on that page. Images should be 1200 x 800 px. The footer contains Facebook links and copyright info.