System Documentation
This topic should periodically be reviewed for System Documentation changes. This PDF document provides an overview of the TFS website as of 11/2025 (prior to moving the documentation to the web). Much of this will be put into content on the website but is uploaded here for expediency.
Post Tables One option to organize how data is displayed is to use a manual query against the WordPress database. This approach eliminates the need to manually add new content to a list of content for a specific usage. Although not exceedingly difficult it still requires database knowledge and some technical acumen. Post Table Pro…
Categories and Tags provide a powerful way to organize Posts. Only Posts can be assigned Categories and Tags, they do not apply to Pages. All training material in our websites is stored in Posts so this is really helpful when combined with Post Tables created in the Post Table Pro plugin. Current Categories We have…
Plugin are useful toolkits that expand WordPress capabilities. As WordPress changes, improvements are made to the Plugin software, security exposures are corrected, etc., and the Plugin will require updating. These changes occur frequently and are probably the most frequent changes to the system. Since they occur so regularly, it often makes sense to do these…
Child Themes We have created a Child Theme in the websites to isolate any modifications we make from updates to plugins or WordPress itself. While it provides a very robust environment for enhancing or extending the environment, we are really only currently using is to simplify modifications to the functions.php file. This file is key…
In the event that a student is connecting to the wrong cohort or someone is testing by changing the Learning Communities Post, we may need to reset the Cookie. We may also want to change the cookie to cycle through the Communities to verify that they are working correctly after system maintenance. The first way…
Once you have finished update your staging environment and are ready to update the production environment, use this checklist to promote your changes back into production. Note that promotion COMPLETELY overlays the production system so ANY changes made to it after the staging area was created will be lost if they weren’t also put on…
A “best practice” for computing systems is to introduce and test changes to the system in a separate environment to avoid outages and operational inconsistencies. The process described here suggests doing ALL changes in a Staging environment, test them there, then promote them back into Production. Several Plugins in production are disabled then after promotion…
The techforseniors.info Domain website is hosted by Hostinger.com. Within the Domain we use subdomains, such as Staging and Test to do work that might potentially negatively impact our production web presence. Refer to the DOC – How to use the Staging Environment for more information on sub-Domains. Realize that a prefix is used to identify…
Session Variables are not currently used in the TFS environments, but one has been defined to use or to demonstrate the pattern to follow to create a new one. This topic documents describes what they can do. Unlike cookies, session variables are kept on the server and are associated with the particular session. So when…