Amateur Dramatics Company Website
The Modbury Players is an amateur dramatics company which was founded in 1985. They put on one or two productions every year in Modbury, in the South Hams, Devon including coarse acting plays, farces and comedies, musicals and pantomimes.
They have recently started to think about their brand and marketing, creating a new logo, setting up a Facebook page and now a website, which they’ve never had before.
As there was no current website, I recommended using WordPress for this new amateur dramatics website. WordPress is my preferred platform as not only does it allow me to build a site very quickly, but would allow a member of the Modbury Players to update the site too, without needing to have too much technical knowledge.
It was decided that the site would contain a brief history of the amateur dramatics company, photo galleries of past productions, an explanation of how to get involved in the company, a blog to post latest news and a special section for company members to be able to download copies of scripts, songs and committee meeting documents.
There were different approaches that we could have taken for the members area and questions to consider were:
- Who would upload these files? Would it be one person with administration access, or would multiple committee members need to be able to do this? Would this person, or people, have the necessary skills to be able to do this?
- How do we restrict access to the files? Should every member of the company have individual logins or would a single password protecting a section of the site would suffice?
In the end it was decided that just one person with administrator access to the WordPress Admin Area would do all the upload for now and a single password would restrict access on the front end of the website.
To display the files, I use the Document Library plugin from Barn2, a WordPress plugin provider. I tried and tested a few similar plugins from various companies but settled on this one for various reasons.
There are two versions of the plugin: a Lite (free of charge but limited features) and a pro version. The Pro version is great because:
- 3 layout options – List documents in a structured table view, an eye-catching grid layout, or a collapsible folder structure.
- Advanced search and filtering – Let people find what they’re looking for in seconds.
- Document download and preview – Add downloadable documents and/or online previews. Host documents in the Media Library or elsewhere (e.g. Google Drive or Dropbox).
- Easy document organisation – Categorise, tag, and filter your documents.
- Bulk uploads – No need to upload documents one by one.
- Customisable design – Blend with the site’s theme effortlessly.
- Public or private libraries – Use it alone for a public resource library, or with another restricted access plugin such as Password Protected Categories for access control.
