12 Step Meeting List not happening

Hi,
The ‘1’ in import and settings can be disregarded. It has been my experience that it is just to catch our attention to having a ssl-certificate, making your site secure. This ‘secure’ is nothing to worry about right away and if you do want to go with that, you will have to fork up the annual costs for it. GoDaddy’s certificates are for 2 years and cost 199 USD per year so it is quite expensive. If you want that, it will have to be part of your hosting plan (if you want it, watch out for special sales).

Are you on a WordPress hosting site, or is you site hosted and do you use WordPress as an application to create you content?

I will leave the possible technical side of your issue to the plugin people. But I wonder about one thing. When you are in the Import and Settings section, in the right sidebar of the screen, there is a paragraph that says:

“Your public meetings page is right here. Link that page from your site’s nav menu to make it visible to the public.”

Click on the ‘here’ to see if the meetings appear as published page.
If this runs well, then the plugin is doing what it is supposed to do. Copy the address of the page from the browser address box while you are there.

In your website, you then need to make sure that there is something (a button or a menu chapter) that links to the meeting page. So if you have a main navigation menu in your WordPress theme, in the Dashboard, from the black sidebar at the left, look for Appearance>Menus and check that there is a menu item that connects to the meetings page.

There should be an item called ‘Meetings’ in the left part of the Menu overview and you can drag it into the active menu. Save the menu. Then go back to your published page and see if you can locate the meetings now.

Maybe you already know all of the above – but just in case you are new to WordPress and websites: it might be something that guides you to a solution.

Good luck!
Nicky

Hej @osnicky59 and @cachevalleyaa,

I just heard you mention ssl-certificates and wanted to add a note:

By now you can probably find free certificates in your provider’s admin backend.

Search the interface for the keyword “letsencrypt”.

They are a free CA providing 3mo certificates that can be renewed automatically:

https://letsencrypt.org/

Hey, good one. I am going to check that out, thanks!

I did some research. The downside of this is that you have to remember to renew the certificate every 3 months. And there have been some incidents with this provider to do with hacking. I have been told they have made some improvements in the past few years. But the hacking had to do with the ease of getting the certificate from them.

I am no expert here – but I have been told that the primary purpose of a certificate is that the visitor of a secure website can be sure that the website is what it says it is. If they search for AA in a certain area and land on a secure page they can be sure they are really at AA and not on an advertising site. It also enables general maps to start from where the visitor is. Although this can be switched off by the user in their browser. For our meeting list this is not really an argument because we already have strong search options. But in theory I think it could mean that the list starts with today’s meetings in my direct environs. Is that right?

And of course there are other SSL things to consider such as encryption and some additional security in the backend, very important for websites that contain sensitive information.

I stand to be corrected, but this is what I know about SSL certificates.

Hej, great intel.

Yes, if you are on a managed hosting product, make sure that you use a service provided by the hoster, and that it auto-renews.

If you have SSH access you can also use clients like acme.sh, or certbot, if you have root access.

I believe those hacking-incidents probably are no worse than for other domain-validation certs. You have to be able to change the DNS or place files on the web server to show that you own a domain you are requesting a certificate for.

If an attacker is able to do that, your least concern is that cheap letsencrypt cert ??

But yes, you need to renew more often, many people are using the service, your hoster could have implemented the renewal process weirdly, you have a kind of short time window in the automated process, so renewal might sometimes not work — If you notice that too late your site is pretty much inaccessible until you fix it by hand.

But I‘ll accept that danger over having to come up with 5 more bucks a month for a non-profit website /shrug.

Oh, this was off-topic now, ja? ????

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