Western PCHS website is an annual conference using a Divi theme that is specific for conferences. The only functionality that it didn’t have was the ability to archive and show data over the years. For example, they wanted to have a speaker who may have spoken at multiple years be able to show that they had presentations from different conferences. And they also wanted to archive last year’s info but still allow it to be viewable even after the new conference info is loaded.
Client Instructions for Managing the data from year to year.
- At the beginning of a new conference create a brand new top session category for the year. (ie. 2021) Then the session types go under the year (ie. mental health, Adult Developmental, Kids Developmental, etc)
- Add your sessions and your speakers and make sure the sessions are categorized with the year and the sub-category.
- When your session is categorized this way, it will look like this. https://westernpchs.com/session/update-national-core-indicators-survey/ and you can click on the category below and see all sessions in each category, like this. https://westernpchs.com/schedule/kids-developmental-2017-sessions
- Take the previous Year’s schedule (ie. https://westernpchs.com/schedule/2019-sessions/) and add it to this page on past conferences.
- To install the Sessions page on the menu, go to Menu and add category and make sure to add the category for the year. (ie. 2021) Remember the sessions page is not really a page. It is built automatically as you add sessions, categories, and speakers.
Developer’s Notes
- A year parent session category was added and the categories of sessions are nested under the year. For example, 2019 is the parent category and mental health, disability etc is a subcategory underneath.
- Category Functionality was added for the Speakers Custom Post Type. There is a plugin that handles this and it alters one of the existing arguments of the speaker’s custom post type and it added taxonomy functionality. Speakers is now its own menu item and conference year is the custom taxonomy.
- The Sessions page is not really a page, it is a category with a customized template. An example of this is https://westernpchs.com/schedule/2019-sessions/. As speakers are added and as they are added in the category year/category (ie. 2021/mental health), then those speakers will automatically populate this page.