There are two areas for general upkeep of the site – the WordPress website and IONOS hosting.

WORDPRESS

These are the main items that have to be dealt with (roughly in order of frequency)

• Watch for plugin updates. Ideally, if they affect design, see what the update is all about and try them on the dummy website first. Some updates, especially to do with forms, have been known to break aspects of the web site unless settings have been updated.
• Some plugins cannot be updated just with a click, and the software has to be downloaded from the software provider and then uploaded to our website. This includes filebird (downloads at https://codecanyon.net/downloads, needs login, then go to myaccount, downloads) – unzip folders and use ftp to upload relevant folder content to /wbtlive070923/wp-content/plugins/filebird-pro – it is fine just to overwrite the original files) and Search & Filter Pro. Both of these plugins have been purchased as a one-off and can be used without further payment or support as long as they are manually updated in this way.
• Malcare plugin should provide an alert to problems with any plugin security. Occasionally (max. once a year) it sends emails saying that it could not check the site. Usually just login with the password at https://app.malcare.com to fix this.
• Attend to requests for registration. Check with the Beacon database to ensure they are bona-fide users. Only if they are genuine should they activated, via the WordPress ‘Users’ menu item. Otherwise, they should be deleted at some point – it is likely hackers will try to login even if not activated – such notification can be ignored. Wordfence has a section for blocking IP addresses which may/may not be useful. Just remember not to activate these signups.
• Backups. These are done automatically on a daily basis using the plugin UpdraftPlus. From time to time, it is worth making a backup which is held on your own PC. Use the plugin WPMigrate for this. This can be used to update the dummy test website at https://wbt150723.fairfordu3a.uk/ – 2 stages needed. First, on IONOS get the relevant database and drop every table. Then load the sql file made in the backup on your PC which will rebuild the tables. Second, use FTP to upload/overwrite the plugin files on IONOS with those made in the backup on your PC, and similarly for any new media files.

IONOS

The control panel is at https://login.ionos.co.uk/

To assign/revoke u3a email addresses use the emails tab. Where required, any persons emails can be forwarded, but usually they can just sync emails using IMAP/SMTP. Instructions for users are at https://www.ionos.co.uk/help/email/general-topics/setting-up-email-programs/. The committee@fairfordu3a.uk email address can be accessed to add/remove committee members from the mailing list.

Under the Hosting tab are the facilities for creating/using databases. Only 2 are in use – one for the live website and one for the dummy testing site.

Webspace explorer allows you to manage the filespace. Only 2 directories/folders are really important – one for each of the 2 websites – wbtlive070923 is for the live website and wbteam150723 for the dummy site. Note that these do not have to reflect the names of the websites.

Domains and SSL are for creating subdomains. fairfordu3a.org.uk is the master domain of the account (but not used). Each subdomain will point to its respective ‘top-level’ directory

SFTP allows file transfers directly to/from the server without going through the IONOS interface. Account u1100164871 is really the only one used.