eFlora of India new site- Old vs New navigation

Pl. have a preview of new unfinished efloraofindia site at

Any suggestions are welcome (if they can modify if found good- otherwise I will do them in future after learning the tricks).
All the categories and subcategories, which you see in the main body of the site now will be removed (as we can access these from the right hand side panel) and family category links will be created as in our existing site.
WordPress is a different software, so initially you may feel everything as hotch potch, being used to the current site. But the fortunate thing is that we are able to transfer most of the data including 3,00,000 images and you will get used to it soon.
Dark icons which you see in the body and on search are Categories, subcategories, subcategories etc. and these do not contain any textual or image data, but only listing of subcategories/ posts below them. While A4 paper size icons with black lines in between are Posts, which contain textual or image data.

To give you an example of when you click on ‘Adoxaceae’ category under A, you see Sambucus and Viburnum as subcategories (which on clicking will show further subcategories and posts) and you also see Sambucus and Viburnum as posts (which on clicking will show comparative images and other textual data).

It is really nice to see the independent site, it is quite comfortable in its usage.. and to me it is almost same as our google site..
It was a huge task, and has been timely executed by your marvellous enthusiasm and hard work..
Congratulations for this achievement

Excellent

Looks exciting !

In fact, one advantage we have got is that all images have been downloaded and stored in our WordPress site and properly linked. In case in future, Google wants to shut down their Google groups including their archives, current images in our new site will not he affected.

Happy to see new and independent eFI.

Team eFI deserve salutations for making this resource permanent, not affected by Google’s changing policies.
I visited few pages and managed to see the desired information. It will certainly take some time to get acquainted with new site and it’s interface.
How to edit the text and other formatting has to be learnt to ensure our contribution now.
More we use it, more we learn about the advantages in new Avatar or eFI.
My best wishes.

Thanks, … Unlike Google sites, only two user accounts are allowed to edit this site. So anyone can send me the details and I will have to do the needful.

It is pleasant and excellent to view the tree of efi with fascinating new leaves and flower buds. best wishes for the new form

Great job, can see a lot of hard work to give this impressive and convenient look to our website. Congrats to all members.

Thanks to you all and your blessings. I have tried to keep it as much the same as earlier, as most of our members are familiar with this format.
In fact, migration has been the bottleneck since the beginning.
First all pages were migrated by the CMS2CMS team, but images were not appearing in the WordPress directory.
When this process was completed for the majority of images in another two weeks time by them, Ladybirdweb offered me flat pages with no linking between them.
Again migration was done with proper linking as far as possible by the CMS2CMS team, but then the migrated image links were not working this time.
Again the whole process was repeated and started and it took almost three weeks from the CMS2CMS team to complete the work again.
Now I think the new site has come with minimum damages to the data, but formating has to be reworked by me over many years.
Heartiest congratulations for the new website. Shifting such a huge  database from  google groups to WordPress was a unimaginable. You and  your team have made it possible through your forward looking approach  and extreme devotion. While going through the pages on new website, it is not difficult to locate the required information. However,
clustering and arrangement looked excellent in previous site
(https://sites.google.com/site/efloraofindia/species/a—l/a/acanthaceae/acanthus
compare with new
https://efloraofindia.com/category/species/a-l-d0/a/acanthaceae/acanthus/;
similarly compare Pillars and Moderators on both the sites). I am  confident that you will format the pages to look even greater than Google groups site. I think, we should create new email IDs on the new website for  sending posts and should withdraw from Google Groups  completely before they put new conditions and come up with new
policies for such groups.
Garg ji, you have also put in your monetary resources for the site  migration as well. We  also wish to give a small contribution for this selfless project.
Thanks, …
Earlier we had categorisation (subpage listing) and comparative images and details in a single page. Now there are two different pages- one for category as given by you. And another for comparative images and details as below:

Pl. see The Pillars and The moderators pages in the new site:
Formatting has also been disturbed badly, which I have to correct over many years.
Anyhow, that our data is safe- that is most important to us. At least our work will not be affected in the long term, though it will have issues in the short term.
Your links are taking me to the desired pages. However, when I am starting from the home page, I am not able to reach at the  desired location.
How to search for pages with comparative images?

Thanks, …
We have to first understand the fundamental working of WordPress (Concept of Categories and Posts) as below:
Dark icons which you see in the body are Categories, subcategories, subcategories etc. and these do not contain any textual or image data, but only listing of subcategories/ posts below them. While A4 paper size icons with black lines you see on browsing (below categories) and on search are Posts, which contain textual or image data.
To give you an example of when you click on ‘Adoxaceae’ category under A, you see Sambucus and Viburnum as subcategories (which on clicking will show further subcategories and posts) and you also see Sambucus and Viburnum as posts (which on clicking will show comparative images and other textual data).
On searching, results only show Posts (A4 paper size icons with black lines). Try searching on Sambucus, you see the following Posts:
Sambucus  etc.
On clicking Sambucus, you will find the comparative images and details.
However, while searching for a common term like Acanthus may show hundreds of results and it is difficult to find the Acanthus page on search. this one has to find while browsing under the Category: Acanthaceae page. For that you have to look at the bottom at 2, 3, 4, >, >> etc. I could find it on the 5th page as Acanthus

Thank you, …

Salute to you for your determination to migrate the huge volume of content, almost unwieldy, from Google Sites to a paid site.
This exodus will go on for quite some while, and I am certain that you will finish it, and match the real-time postings in eFI group.
I am well aware of herculean efforts that will need to be put to restore the formatting of the pages.
On visiting the new site, I found the layout easy on eyes – the body text is sufficiently large thereby no stress on eyes.
On the other hand, search results get distributed into several pages if a popular genus name is searched. I tried “Hibiscus” with the intent of getting to the species page.
In any case, with continuous usage of the new site, I will get to know its behaviour, and I will also see some things which I was not aware of.
In case of Hibiscus search results, I clicked on the first displayed result. In the page that opened, I could see in the top section of the page – the breadcrumb navigation. That was of great help, I could very easily then go to the exact page from there.
The same can be achieved by drill-down navigation from the right-hand panel, though using a couple of more clicks.
All in all, it is heartening to find all the content safely delivered to the new site
Thanks, …
You have been a constant support and initial discussions with you and others led to finalisation of our requirements quickly. You continued to support with ideas like CMS2CMS migration. In fact, insisting on it.
I think we should be thankful to CMS2CMS team, in particular Mr. Paul Hulka, for continuously providing support despite some issue or the other and finally delivering the superb migration after almost more than two months of their efforts. And that too much beyond the call of duty.

Now members can see family page links in the body of the new site as in our existing site.

I have asked Ladybirdweb to show posts (pages which have text and images) alphabetically (and not as per the date of creation of posts as currently seen) while browsing the site, to increase their numbers from 10 (currently) to say 20 at a time and show search results on basis of the heading of the posts (and not as per the date of creation of posts as currently seen).
Let us see how much they are able to do it.
This should help us in getting desired results in proper browsing and searching the site.
Any further suggestions are welcome.

That will be great, …

Update:
They have increased the number of posts seen while browsing our new site (https://efloraofindia.com/) from 10 (currently) to say 20 at a time.
They are unable to show posts (pages which have text and images) alphabetically (and not as per the date of creation of posts as currently seen) while browsing the site and show search results on basis of the heading of the posts (and not as per the date of creation of posts as currently seen) as it appears there is no such provision in their ‘Hero theme’ used for this site.
Problems may mainly arise in finding a post (page) mainly where matching results are more than 20 e.g. in the case of Acanthus.
But I found that this can be solved in two different ways:
1. I found there is a very good feature in this iste (not available in the earlier google site). In the site (https://efloraofindia.com/), it shows 20 matching words while typing in the search box. e.g. when I typed ‘Acanthus’, it showed 20 matching words including ‘Acanthus volubilis’, ‘Acanthus spinosus?’ etc. When I increased words in the search from ‘Acanthus’ to ‘Acanthus vo’, it showed one matching word ‘Acanthus’. On selecting ‘Acanthus’, I got my desired genus post with comparative images and other details as below:
2. I searched on efloraofindia.com + acanthus in Google and got this at the top:
https://efloraofindia.com/2011/01/31/acanthus/
I think there is no use in delaying the takeover of the site from them, as I have to make all the changes in the new site that I have done in the Google site in the past 45 days or so. And that itself may take about a month along with learning how to do all this in the WordPress environment. During this period my normal activity on the google groups will be disrupted and there will be a long backlog (of updation of group discussions on the new site) when I am able to assume my normal group work. I hope we are able to come back to normalcy within the next four to five months.

.

Today just tried to open Asystasia page in New and Old eFI sites.
What I found is that in the New site page we are not able to see comparative images of Asystasia species in eFI as it was visible in older one! Or I am not able to navigate correctly?
I followed the path-  s- Seed plants (families)‎ > ‎A—L (families & genera)‎ > ‎A‎ > ‎Acanthaceae‎ > ‎ in older site
and in New site-   /*Species- Seed plants (families) / A—L (families) / A / Acanthaceae / Asystasia /

Thanks, … I think you looked at page https://efloraofindia.com/category/species/a-l-d0/a/acanthaceae/asystasia/
Here you see categories on the top with black icons in front of them and posts (earlier we used to call pages in Classic Google sites) with white paper icons.
While browsing in the new site, you will find both Asystasia ‘categories’ and ‘posts’ at https://efloraofindia.com/category/species/a-l-d0/a/acanthaceae/
Categories you see on the top. and posts are available down below with the list going up to three pages. You can find the desired page in the 3rd page. Link I am giving below:
https://efloraofindia.com/2011/02/08/asystasia/
In such large families, you get the desired result better by searching at Asystasia. You will find the desired post in it at 14th number.

Yes … Got it now. Navigation is a bit different.

Yes, …

.

efi:
It is not possible now but it was much easier to browse the earlier site. When you search any genus all images of species appear in one go but now we have to click each Id one by one to view images.

No, it is not like that. Nothing much has changed except the way Google sites and WordPress sites (our new site) work.
Here in the new site genus category pages (only listing subcategories without any details) and genus pages (giving details as earlier except subcategory listing) are different.
e.g.
Old site: Commelina 
New Site: Commelina

 

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