The Venus Project website is the digital face of the organization. It aims to provide information to its audience in a systematic way so they are able to learn easily from the vast pool of knowledge that has been collected throughout the years. Continuous improvement is at the heart of The Venus Project and we always strive to design and organize the content better.
The Website team is responsible for:
- Ensuring that all functionality on the website consistently works as expected and resolving any problems that arise
- Developing and adding new features to The Venus Project’s website and the underlying infrastructure
- Researching, testing and implementing technical solutions to problems that The Venus Project faces in pursuing its Aims and Proposals
Our Website is hosted at SiteGround and at the core it’s driven by the content management system WordPress.
The core functionality is provided by these plugins and extensions:
- Online shop: WooCommerce
- Constituent Relationship Management: CiviCRM
- Newsletter System: CiviCRM + CiviMail
- Donations System: GiveWP, CiviCRM + CiviContribute
- Content and Design Structure: Pods Framework
- Automated Test Platform: Codeception + Selenium
We are always looking for new people with skills and enthusiasm to take The Venus Project’s website to a new level. If you want to contribute to the constantly ongoing web development, these are the requirements:
- Experience with any of the above platforms, extensions and plugins
- Experience with some or all of the following:
- PHP
- MySQL
- Javascript/jQuery
- HTML / CSS
- Apache
- nginx
- Linux server administration
- Web security
- Postmaster and email deliverability
If you don’t possess any of the mentioned skills but would like to learn them, see the section below. We have collected a set of materials and ordered them in a way that gives you a learning path. We hope this will enable anyone with the desire to become a web developer to do so and to eventually join our team.
To get involved with the team, please submit the form below.
Learn Web Development
For those who do not have web development skills but would like to learn them, we have compiled a list of resources to help you do that. Before you start, here are some general guidelines to follow throughout your learning experience:
– Do all the exercises from the tutorials. Take the time to complete the steps and tasks they give you. Don’t just watch how they do it. Real learning happens when you do it yourself.
– Do not copy and paste code. Instead, when a tutorial goes through some code, type it manually yourself. This will help you think about what is actually happening in the code. You will understand it much better if you write it instead of just looking at it.
– Try very hard to understand what is happening at every single line of the code that is being analyzed in a tutorial. Take your time and really think it through. What is actually happening in the code and why is it done this way? Sometimes you may just need to give yourself some time and think about it, other times you may need to research it. If you need to research it, it is likely that you would need to read the documentation about the syntax of the language that occurs on the line you don’t understand. (As an example, if we have the code 1 !== "1"
, we might need to read the documentation on integers (like 1
), on strings (like "1"
) and on the !==
operator.)
– The sooner you start doing projects by yourself from scratch, the better. So, as soon as you start feeling comfortable with the basics of some language, perhaps after completing a tutorial, try to do at least one project all alone, by yourself. Try to come up with a project that is more or less at your level. It’s one thing to follow a tutorial, but it’s a very different thing to have to come up with a plan for how to do the whole job, completely on your own. Doing this will also force you to read the documentation of some of the language’s syntax that you might need to use, so your knowledge will become much deeper this way.
If you are looking to get involved in web development (which means creating programs and websites that are available on the Internet, not just on your computer), the place to start with is HTML. Then continue with CSS. After that you may continue with either Javascript or PHP. (We have not included languages that aren’t used in the platforms The Venus Project utilizes.)