Oakley Chamber of Commerce

Project Description

I spent two years on the board of the Oakley Chamber. When I got there the website was a mess of Google Pages. We created a site with a gorgeous member directory, event listings, and a lot of useful information for local businesses.

One thing the new site added was the ability for people to join the Chamber or renew their memberships online. My brilliant chief developer even figured out how to get Gravity Forms to calculate the pro rating for people who joined in mid-year. We used Gravity Forms plus PayPal for membership registration and for event registration.

The site did not implement “membership” in the sense of content restriction–all of the material published on the site is available to anyone. If I were building the site today, it would be easier to set up the site so that members could create and edit their own profiles, but the truth in this case is that very few people had any interest in doing that: they preferred to send it to the webmaster, sometimes on paper, and have it added for them. (One big problem with association websites is getting members to fill in their material.)

Membership profiles on the Oakley Chamber site include social media links, maps, a large free-form content area, a photo gallery, and a place to display events, jobs, and special offers for that company (pulled in via Posts2Posts). The idea at the time was not only to upgrade the existing website into something usable, but to create a member directory far superior to anything available from the standard chamber web solutions. In that we succeeded spectacularly.

The custom fields on the site were built with the Meta Box plugin–before we discovered ACF.

Because the Oakley Chamber did not use an email service provider such as MailChimp, we used WP Email Capture instead of the Genesis eNews Extended plugin.

Based on the News child theme for Genesis.