G-Suite

USNA Out email is handled through G-suite. This includes email communications through the website via the SMTP Post plug in.

Users

We currently do not have an OPSMAN policy on who can be assigned a USNA Out email address. As of 6/24/18, nine members have address.

Addresses also exist for website functions:

usnaout@usnaout.org
news@usnaout.ord (depreciated)

Google Groups

Groups are most useful as collective addresses. Groups can also be used as forwarding addresses (depreciated with WordPress). Groups archive all communications that are sent to the groups. We have reduced the number of groups from 63 (pre-Wordpress migration) to 21, of which 16 of those are used for personal email forwarding, awaiting notice from the users to remove them. The four remaining groups are:

Board@
Board.Associates@
Membership@ – membership administrators
Newsletter – newsletter administrators
Webadmin@ – website administrators

Hosting Services

Users

Hosting admins can log into the Dreamhost control panel at panel.dreamhost.com. Each admin has an independent hosting login.

Note the term user has three different applications which are totally independent. For security reasons, passwords are never the same.

Dreamhost account users – manage payment, registrations, setup hosting, etc.

Shell/SFTP users – have the ability to talk from their console to the Dreamhost server. This is how development sites are created/destroyed.

MySQL users – all databases have a username and password.

WordPress Sites

Here is a good read about WordPress site management best practices.

As of 6/24/2018, there are the following independent WordPress installs:

USNAOut.org – production membership site
thegouge.usnaout.org – production static site
dev1.usnaout.org – tables/directory/hosting empty.
dev2.usnaout.org – development site – updated 6/24

See descriptions and settings for Plugins

Duplicating a Site

Updates to Plugins should be tested on the development site prior to updating on our production site. A duplicate of the site in the current state should be made. This is an easy process.

An existing development site can be replaced with the current state.

SFTP the installer.php and the archive.zip files into the root directory where the website is located.
Visit subdomain.usnaout.org/installer.php to run the installation package (where “subdomain” should be replaced with the name of the development site. This will start the installer.
Provide the database details, test for conectivity
Run the installation.
Log in. You will go to the admin page.
Remove the installation files by using the links at the top of the admin page.
Delete alls users except those needed for development/training.

If this install is a restore of our primary site (USNAOut.org) the .htaccess file must be edited to force SSL, otherwise users will get security errors on some browsers. Add the following to the top of the file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Cron Jobs

Running a cron triggers our website to check several things, like if there are updates available to the WordPress core, or if there are newsletters waiting to be transmitted. We run a cron job on our site hourly.

Sending a Newsletter

These are basic instructions using the Newsletter Plugin.