Jackie from the International Harvester Heritage Association contacted me looking for help with their idea for a document archive website.
The idea was to create a website that housed their expanding collection of original manuals, service guides and advertisements connected with the International Harvester brand and make these available online for their members to view. The site also needed to handle memberships, events, news, galleries and a little e-commerce.
After some conversations I started mapping the document archive. This needed additional taxonomies settings up to cover the different makes, models and types of machinery the site would contain.
Jackie and the rest of the team started the process of scanning the documents into .pdf format ready to upload to the site.
The site is designed to be as clean and simple as possible, and aims to be easy for its members to use.
E-Commerce
The site needed a little shop so I opted for the popular WooCommerce e-commerce plugin, this also integrates nicely with a couple of different membership plugins meaning I could use the same checkout for both membership and regular products.
Memberships
The membership side of things is handled using RightPress’s Membership plugin. I’ve used the plugin in a couple of different projects, here’s a link to a full review I did a while back. The IHHA site only needed one membership plan, so I dropped the standard content restriction box in the admin screens opting for a simple checkbox instead, this makes it a lot simpler for the site administrators to secure content.
PDF’s
I used a couple of plugins for handling the .pdf’s, one to handle opening and viewing the pdf’s directly on the site, and the other for generating thumbnail images of the front covers. These also mean the site doesn’t rely on an special modules needing to be installed on the server hosting the site.
The standard WordPress media library is used for the pdf’s so additional taxonomies and fields were added here. The display of the pdf’s use attachment pages, so extra work was needed to get these to display on front of the website and in the search results.
Events
The Association visit a lot of shows each year, so some additional fields were added (a start and end date) to standard Posts and a category set aside. The site is smart enough to recognise future and past events (provided the date and time is set correctly on the server!) so lists them in the right places automatically.
Galleries
WordPress already has a gallery function, so I tapped into this on the archive pages generating a smaller version of the gallery as a thumbnail to better represent what the gallery Post contains.
I look forward to seeing the association and archives grow.