Maintaining the WordPress Site

The City Nature Challenge website is developed and maintained by NHMLAC's developers. Before 2023 when the CNC was relaunched with a Strapi backend, it was hosted on a Ubuntu droplet on the Webmaster Digital Ocean account.

This documentation is outdated as of February 6th, 2023 when the City Nature Challenge site was relaunched with a Strapi backend.

Backups

The CNC website uses the WordPress plugin "UpdraftPlus" to create backups which are stored in a third party site (such as DropBox or Google Drive). Currently they are backed up to a free DropBox account. Backups are automatically created weekly.

Do not connect backups to a personal account — always use webmaster@nhm.org.

Plugins > UpdraftNow > Settings > Backup Now

Siginging in locally

Not all plugins were installed locally, meaning that the /user method of logging in will not work. Instead use the following url path:/wp-login.php

Working locally

MAMP is used for the local installation. NHMLA does not have a subscription to MAMP Pro, therefore the free tier is used.

Leaderboard

Throughout the course of the CNC, which lasts for approximately a week, the collective results (opens in a new tab) section of the website is updated with live data from contributors. The leaderboard page (i.e. "collective results") is currently calling a variety of APIs such as iNaturalist or GBIF to populate the leaderboard.

This is currently done via client-side JS. For a user to see updated data they must refresh the page. In the future a cached version of the data should be served in order to increase load times.

After the CNC is completed and the results are in, a file in the format of a JSON or CSV is used to populate the leaderboard.