Welcome to the new EPS site

A new look for the EPS Web site!

Welcome to the EPS’ new web site.  We hope you will find it easy to use and an improvement on the old site. The aim was to have a clean and simple modern site with a minimum of clutter. The dark background was chosen for good legibility and a sympathetic background for viewing images. Your comments and suggestions welcome- either in the comments below (will be moderated), or email Tom Gardner or use the contact form to contact the Webmaster. Feature requests will be discussed by the website group, who have jointly approved this design.

The main changes other than the new design (using WordPress) are:

Image galleries: The original image galleries will no longer be used, and we have also dropped the forum. This is because neither were used much in recent years, and we do not want to have a site people need to register with and log on to. Those who need to contribute news items or edit pages can be set up with an account with appropriate privileges. If you really want to look at the old image gallery site, it is still online here.

While the site can have images displayed locally in galleries, we are mainly going to be using embedded feeds from various Flickr groups that we currently have, or will set up. This will give members who use Flickr to add their images directly to these groups (currently DeLOS and the C-D group). For others, who do not wish to use Flickr, the relevant group person can  upload their images to the EPS Flickr account, or the member can email them direct to it, and they can be added to the groups from there with appropriate attribution to the photographer.

News items: We plan to have most of the news items posted on the EPS Facebook page, which will then be visible on the EPS website as a news feed on the front page. This makes it easier for members to contribute items as many already have Facebook accounts, and they can get a lot more exposure through social media sharing. However, some items will be posted direct on the site.

There will certainly be more additions to the site, but we felt that it was important to get a functional site up in advance of the new season, and additional content and improvements can be added.Please send any comments and suggestions to me, positive or negative- we need to know!

Tom Gardner ARPS

EPS Webmaster

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Clive Christopherson

    Tom

    Under the box ‘Members’ there is a login asking for username and password. How do you get a username and password?

    On the old website was there not a form you could fill in to get deeper into the site – see images etc?

    I’ve just joined the EPS but putting in my email address registered with the society drew a blank.

    Sorry to ask what may be a silly question or one where the answer is staring me in the face.

    Clive

    1. admin

      Hi Clive,

      The new site does not have any area that requires a member login. The login link is only there for those who have been given subscriber or editor rights to post items or pages.

      The reasons we had a site registration and login on the old site was to
      a) allow people to comment on items. This rarely happened in all the years it was up, and can now be safely allowed using captchas and moderation instead.
      b) allow people to post. So few people did this, that it easier to just set up an account for those that need to.
      c) allow pass-through login to the forum. This was rarely used and has been dropped.
      d) allow pass-through login to the image gallery site. Few people used this to upload images, and fewer still to comment, so this has also been dropped.

      On the old site, you did not need to log in to see anything, with a very few exceptions – see below. This was a common misunderstanding that led to hundreds of unnecessary registrations, even from non-members.

      For the very few things we might want to make members only (like the bulletin past issues), it is easier to put it in a password-protected page and circulate the password.

      For Galleries, we are mostly using embedded Flickr galleries, as many members already have accounts, and for they are free to create and give 1 terabyte of storage for free. From there, images can be added to the appropriate EPS Flickr group. At the moment we only have the DeLOS and C-G group Groups, but we will be making more. We also have an EPS Flickr account which we could use to upload images from anyone without a Flickr account, with full attribution. We can also set up galleries locally on the site.

      Drop me a mail if you have any suggestions for galleries; this is an area under development.

      Cheers,

      Tom

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