I want to welcome all of you to our new and exciting members section of the website. In order to make sure that everyone is comfortable and familiar with how the new site is structured, I wanted to take some time and go over the basics.

The first and most important thing is that you must be a registered user in order to access the majority of the information that is located here. To register, click the new user link and basically follow the directions. One thing that we want to make very clear, is that we insist that when you register, you must use your real name in your preferences. We periodiocally will go through the list of all users and if we notice users who have hidden their identity, we will delete them from the system. This way we can help ensure that the information that is here for members of our community, not the general public.

We also want to familiarize you with the navigation. You can see under the topic menu, that we have a number of links. Here is the type of information you will find under each topic:

General News: Here you will find general news that relates to the entire subdivision. This will include social functions as well as the neighborhood clean up date.

Architectural Control Committee: This will keep you up-to-date with all of the actions of the ACC and what has been submitted and what has been approved.

Letters from the President: This will contain the president’s monthly letter to the community. This is also usually one of the feature stories on the front page of the newsletter.

Amenities: This houses the pool rules and other items of interest in relation to our common areas.

Contact: This will give the entire contact list for everyone on the board and committee chairpeople.

Finances: This will show our balance sheet from 2003.

Downloads: This is where you can download all the forms and documents for the subdivision. The ACC request form is here as well as the covenants and bylaws.

From the Webmaster: This area will contain any articles written by the webmaster with relations to any new features or functions of the website as well as any tips and tricks for overall internet related material.
We also now have a public calendar that enables us to post any new, upcoming events that we want you all to be a part of.

The poll section will enable us to take a pulse survey of topics that can range from what you would like to see done with the website, to what you would like to do for our back-to-school parties for the kids, to anything else.

You will also be able to do a keyword search to find any articles or documents that relate to what you are looking for.

Overall, we are extremely happy and excited about the new site and we hope that you all become more involved and submit your own contributions with stories so we can trully make this a community portal.

For all of you geeky people like me, you might want to know how and what we are using to make this site happen. Well we are using Geeklog, which is an Open Source code that enables content management. It is based on PHP and a MySQL database. The public site is in the process of being converted into PHP as well, but currently it is still in HTML.

As always, if you have any problems or questions regarding the website, feel free to e-mail me at webmaster@chaddsridge.net.

Christopher Smith
webmaster