National Railway Historical Society, Inc.

This is a large WordPress based website with 200+ pages. The original National Railway Historical Society (NRHS) website was done with the Drupal content management system which had not been updated in sometime. Drupal is a very good system, however, it takes a developer with some high-level skills to manage properly. For easy-of-use and ease-of-updating they hired me to redevelop their site in WordPress.

For the look, I kept it similar to their original website. I did brighten up the main colors and enlarged the fonts for readability. I chose to keep the basic look uncomplicated so visitor focus would be on the content.

It was important to them to be able to manage and update the site on their own. This was a challenge when organizing their 120+ individual Chapter pages. The “All Chapters” page is broken down into section for individual States or Areas (which have their own sub-pages), and the Chapters are listed as sub-pages under each State/Area. I needed to create a system of pages so if an old Chapter was disbanded or a new one was created the page would show (or not show) properly on all pages higher up in the hierarchy. Using a combination of custom fields, custom templates, and custom database queries I was able to make a site that “self-corrects”.

Creating the 120+ Chapter pages themselves was a fun challenge in itself. As not all NRHS Chapters have their own websites, it was important to have all their information on their page. And, it had to be easy for the administrator to make changes as member and meeting place and times often change. With the help of Advanced Custom Fields plugin I created fields for every possible piece of information that would be needed. These fields show up on their individual WP Admin pages as input fields which can be easily changed. Then using IF-Statements on a custom Chapters template, only those fields with information in them will be displayed to the public.

Each Chapter page has a main header image specific to that Chapter. This was quite a challenge to find appropriate images that were both large enough and in the correct orientation to be suitable. Some, but not all, Chapters have a introduction/description which might include an image. If you know WordPress, this area of the page is the normal “content” area created by the Visual Editor (now Gutenberg). Everything on the page below that is either a custom field or a custom database query.

Chapter numbers, websites, officers, meeting times, etc., are all custom fields. Below that is an interactive Google Map with a directions feature.

Below the map are two menus to help visitors explore the site more easily. The first of these sections show all the Chapters for that State/Area. The second show all the States/Areas.

Another noteworthy page is the “District” page that uses the district number field of each Chapter to organize them by their district. This also is accomplished with the use of ACF plugin and custom queries on a custom template.

This was a large project and results give the client a solid, well-functioning website they are able to maintain themselves.