The architecture is somewhat complex (read very unclear) for a couple of main reasons
- The convoluted history of this web site, starting from a simple spreadsheet through a database driven site with the WordPress blog being added later.
- The author, MGW, Was a proficient Fortran 4 programmer 40 years ago, then stopped programming until about 10 years ago (C# Sudoku solving program), then only started learning HTML, php, JavaScript etc. as a fun challenge to program this website about 4 years ago. Some parts are the way they are since I didn’t know any better at the time, some parts, such as the AJAX to enable input without refreshing the whole screen, have been added in an ad-hoc manner.
However it seems to work. Here is a brief history:-
Initial spreadsheet
Dave Knewstubb was the GIN leader until he sadly died in June 2016. Membership was less than 40 and he kept all the member details in a spreadsheet which he would, from time to time, copy to all.
The format was somewhat similar to
where an “X” would indicate participation in an activity and an “O” would indicate the organiser.
First web approach
Ted Wilson took over as leader and created a web site. The Excel sheet, above, was turned into a pdf file which would appear when someone clicked the appropriate link.
We then used a simple macro for the Excel spreadsheet to generate some HTML each time the spreadsheet changed. This was then pasted into the website. The HTML enabled us to display a table of details of members for each activity, plus a list of activity coordinators.
In parallel I wrote some code to display a monthly calendar based on data that I manually entered into a database.
Second web approach
Sadly Ted died in November 2016. We had been using a hosting package of Ted’s where he got 3 websites for the price of 2. One was used to promote his book, the second to manage lettings on his holiday home in Spain and the GIN club got the third for free. We could not go asking Monika to keep this active for us, including giving me the administrator’s password, so I transferred to HostGator since that seemed to be most reasonable and had ready access to WordPress and a good file manager. At that time WordPress was a future thought as a means of hosting a blog.
I then created a database with essentially the same format as the above Excel file and used this to generate the pages you see whenever you click on “Member Details” or “Distribution Lists” on the GIN club home page. The database is called “gin_members” and an extract is shown below.
This eliminated running an Excel macro then pasting HTML into the web site each time there was a change to members details. All that was now required was to update the database. BUT this had to be done manually.
Adding in WordPress
WordPress was very easy to install in our hosting package. It gave us a whole sophisticated blog handling tool. It was also easy to make WordPress the master with links to the custom code for member details, distribution lists and calendar.
However, now we had a lot of data duplicated between the WordPress databases and the custom databases. The way out of that was to make WordPress the master. All user data such as names, phone numbers, addresses is entered and stored via WordPress. The custom databases only contain information which links the users to specific activities. The main such table is called “gin_member_activities”, extract below.
But, because much of the code was written to work off the gin_members table, above, The first thing the code does is to create a temporary copy of the gin_members table plus a couple of other tables from information in the WordPress databases plus tables such as gin_member_activities. Thus a number of tables in the database are called Create on Demand Tables and are generated each time any member accesses the web site.
Click here for a schematic of Create On Demand Tables
