Account Portals - Explained

What is this.. Portal thing you speak of?

Why does it exist, what is its purpose? Well, I hope to answer those questions in this article. Accounts were added to the website in early 2021 and ever since we just seem to keep coming up with new ideas to implement with the new system. Accounts opened up so many new opportunities with the website, allowing us to restrict access to certain pages, based on the type of account the user is using. Most notably, this allowed us to create a Warrior account, which is currently still in development. (1/26/21) I can’t speak to what exactly that account will look like yet, but I can say that it will help serve our organization’s mission to empower and support those affected by cancer, it will be designed to be a useful tool in the Warrior’s fight. That’s why we’re taking extra time and care to create the Warrior account, it’s important that we do this right. Of course, none of our content is ever perfect and just like every other Tech Dept. asset, the Warrior account will never be “finished.” We will always strive to find ways to improve.

So.. how do accounts work?

The long story short version is, accounts are held by users of the website, our account system then restricts access to pages based on which type of account the user is using. It’s like a hierarchy, a board member’s account will give much more access to our website’s pages than a standard member’s account would. When developing this system, we wanted to create a place where account holders could access all of the pages they have access to for ease of use. We decided to use Portals to accomplish this, each portal is specifically designed and developed to meet the needs of the portal’s respective account holders. The images below show how these portals look. (These images were taken in the very early stage of accounts development, portal design may differ from these images)

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The Tech Dept.’s Portal

You can see the dark version of the Tech Dept.’s (early days) portal in the image provided. As an added perk, we’ve even added “light” and “dark” designs to all of the portals. This allows the user to customize their experience a bit more, and the darker versions are even healthier for your eyes. Remember your mom telling you not to sit too close to the TV as a child? Essentially, that’s the same ball game here. You may have noticed that even with the light versions of our design, the background isn’t actually white, it’s a very light brown. This not only helps out with design, but more importantly it helps to reduce the strain on your eyes when viewing our pages, simply by darkening the background a bit. Cool huh? We think so. Eventually we plan to have a dark option on every page of the site, it’s on our Tech Dept. to-do list along with many other great improvement ideas.

As an added membership perk, standard accounts also get access to view certain workstations like the one shown in the image. Members can’t interact with the boards, but can view all of its contents! If you’re interested in what a certain department within our organization is up to, you can sign up for our free account here, once signed up, you’ll be able to view workstations in your Member Portal.

Live View - Tech Dept.’s Workstation

For a more interactive experience, you can play with the Tech Dept.’s Workstation here. You’ll notice you don’t have access to edit/create/delete, but you can view what the the Tech Dept. is up to anytime, and anywhere you have an internet connection. We in the Tech Dept. use our workstation pretty frequently, so you’ll be able to see live updates as we interact with the board.

I want one!

Awesome! We really like these boards too, they help us to stay organized and on-task. Which as you probably know, we’re a Technology Department so we’re mostly comprised of caffeine-fueled work horses who can be easily distracted at times. We use Ora to stay organized, and it’s great when you have an idea but can’t really act on it now, we just add it to the workstation!

You can find these services by simply searching them in Google. I’ve personally used Trello for years, but I found that Ora provided to be a better option for the organization. So far Ora has been great, and is being used by the Tech and Events departments at time of writing. It’s been really cool to watch others use the system, and with my to-do list now publicly viewed, it helps to hold me accountable as well.

I would love to set you all up with your own board, but the boards do cost $$ to operate based on the amount of users, so in order to keep our costs realistic, the Tech Dept. will only be setting up workstations when the cost incurrence has been presented to the board, with the majority voting “yes.”

Conclusion

At time of writing, we’re just getting started with the Workstations. All of us in the Tech Dept. are excited to develop and improve these systems as we march into the future. We never consider our work “done”, there’s always room for improvement. We will be constantly editing and updating these systems, and we’ll post changelogs outlining all of the changes made. These changelogs will be logged in our organization’s Vault and will be publicly accessible at all times in the blog. That way you can stay up to date on any changes we make, and always check back to the Workstation to see what we’re currently working on.

I hope you all enjoy the new workstations as much as we do and of course, please report any bugs/issues to Tech@cancercreateswarriors.org. Thank you!

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