Welcome to the new HCCO.ORG
For many years hcco.org has been hosted on various content management systems. Back in the 1990s this made a lot of sense - there weren’t many hosting platforms that very good, none of them were WYSIWYG and overall the experience was very bad. It had a lot of upsides - we could create our own site where members could interact with the community, provided a place for folks to discover us and overall provided a great platform for the community to come together and interact. There was one downside - there is a certain level of entropy involved in CMSs. Stated another way - they break over time. Updating one plugin breaks another, updating JavaScript versions breaks old plugins, updating the CMSs breaks plugins, old code gets hacked, the comments section is constantly being bombarded with spam, writing a page or article required you to understand many technical details that most folks just don’t care about, it goes on and on. In the early days it was worth it - we did what we had to in order to provide a website for the community.
These days that is no longer true. There are providers out there that provide a sleek, stable hosting solution that make the website faster, more usable, and generally easier for the volunteers who keep the organization running. This new site provides a much easier interface for members who want to contribute but don’t want to spend their time remembering the quirks of some system that is built for organizations much larger than ours. It also has the advantage of being significantly more stable and quite a bit cheaper. Overall a huge win.
There is one major downside— recurring donors through the old website will need to set up new donations. Donations were one of the major reasons to switch to our current hosting provider. The donation plugin in WordPress left a lot to be desired and caused a lot of our members grief. We very much appreciate the folks who help keep the lights on and want to make changing your donations easy and donating through the old website definitely was not easy or convenient. Learn more about setting up and managing your recurring donation here.
The board hopes you enjoy the new website and find it useful. If you have suggestions about what you would like to see here, feel free to drop a line to us at board@hcco.org.