We (um.. accidentally) updated the club website hosting framework to wp version 3.5 this evening. So now club websites will have a new interface that’s been improved, making things all that much more easy to manage.

Club Websites Now Easier to Manager

New Gallery Lets You Easily Select Existing Photos to Insert Galleries or Reuse single photos for news posts.

Between Easy Mode and the Standard Website Admin interface, club’s didn’t really need much help. However, part of the 3.5 framework is geared towards making website management easier. The biggest is the new Media Uploader (which of course means we will have to update all of our lovely support videos).

Now you can browse thumbnails of things you had previously loaded (other pages, news, etc). This allows you to recycle trail photos when you update your snowmobile club website trail conditions, or gun range shots when you publish your weekly range report. This means you can have a pretty site with photos and thumbnails, without having to constantly keep adding photos and thumbnails.

Plus overall, it just makes more sense. Before you had to add images one at a time, sometimes loosing the settings of titles, etc.

Dashboard has changed:

The dashboards been cleaned up, click “Screen Options” On the Dashboard home page to play around with this.

Link Manager (blogroll) GONE!

This is a godsend for us, no one really has known what that was for since wp version 2.. about 8 years ago. There are far better ways to display links to things, and between theme’s grids and our columns plugin, there was never a need for something like that. It wound up confusing people, etc, so we will not miss it. It will not effect those who have “Sponsor” pages or Widgets on the Club Websites. A few of our older templates may have some “blogroll” areas still.

New Club Website Template / Theme Available

Part of the upgrade comes with a new Twenty Twelve theme, which is mobile friendly (which isn’t really that big of news as 80% of our club website template themes are mobile friendly).

This new style is fully customization and very clean. For those with simplistic website approaches, and ideally just a header image, a unique color, and a custom front page.