Acknowledgements and History of the Website 

NB Access permissions. The Club has requested that access be restricted  to any information considered private, This has been implemented and is awaiting committee approval before rolling out to all members. If access to any restricted information is required, email probus.groote.schuur@gmail.com. Access can be granted to any club member.   If you have a Gmail email, this is simple and automatic. For other emails, a linking process must be done as described here. 

Many members have contributed to the website and it would be remiss not to record their vital role.

The origins of the website were casual chats at a lunch early in 2025 when Jenny Day asked "It would be nice to have a website, but what would it cost?" As I had done more than 30 websites, all for free, I replied "They can be done for free". Well, that was me on the hook! I made it very clear then, and it remains true to this day, that a website designer can do nothing without content. Websites are simply empty shells which can be used for organising content, but they usually do not have the essential 'domain knowledge'. This was especially true for Probus Groote Schuur with its rich and deep 20-year history, whereas, as a new member, I had limited knowledge. 

Fortunately, JP, John Newmarch, Frank van der Velde and Chris Owen came to the rescue and contributed volumes of information. The web designer's job, was simply to take this information and organise it into a coherent system. ChatGPT generated an appropriate illustration:

The volume of content presented some serious challenges, 250 talks, a 100 outings and hundreds of rettelsweNs all needed to be displayed in a way that was easy to navigate, John Newmarch played a particularly constructive role in this regard. With each of us working on different browsers we tested several different approaches, to no avail. They always broke and looked messy somewhere. (Websites have to work on Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Duck-Duck Go, Opera and others, as well as on iPhone (Safari) and Android.)  It's a challenge! 

Eventually, drawing on our collective 50 years of experience, we realised that going back to the basics of clean, structured tables which displayed well on all browsers and platforms, was the answer. Little did we know then that this approach laid the essential foundation to handle the request  to protect sensitive member data. This request, made 15 months after the website was first launched,  would have required a major redesign. It turned out to be solvable by simply protecting the essential tables of data.  Thank you, John, for your foresight!

JP provided a steady guiding hand during this time, with his many contributions providing a testing framework. JP was the most prolific contributor to the Club. All his contributions are listed here.  Duncan joined the fray later in 2025, contributing all the rettelsweNs ever published. That story is recorded here

Some additional background for those who may be interested in the technicalities. The Club's website uses a Content Management System (CMS) called Google Sites. It's free, even for websites with several thousand pages (Probus Groote Schuur is currently at over 100 pages and uses only 6% of the free space allocation). Besides being free and very secure, it is regarded as one of the easiest CMSs to use. This has enabled the Club to spread the load and involve other members in the routine site updates.  (Websites that are not updated regularly become stale and 'die'.)  Any additional volunteers who would like to get involved, would be very welcome. It's easy to learn.  And as Google Sites is a Wiki, multiple people can work on it simultaneously.

The main disadvantage of Google Sites is that, unlike CMS systems like WordPress (used by the Owl Club, International Women's Club and many others), it does not support having member-only pages protected by a password.  WordPress would have been a good CMS to use, but it is not free and requires a much higher level of skill, which was not available in the Club. If there is a member  who has WordPress or similar experience and would like to help rehost the website, please speak up! 

Fortunately Google Sites is closely integrated with Google Drive, which does have email-address based access control. That foresight of John's to place most data in tables (stored in Google Drive) has paid off.  By simply setting the permissions on those files, access to the relevant sections of the site can be restricted to members only.  It has some limitations and disadvantages, which are being investigated an d hopefully resolved instead of paying tens of thousands of rand to rehost.  

This restructuring to restrict access to member-only areas, is my last responsibility as website manager, as I have stepped back from an active role. I will continue to provide technical support and training, but will not be involved in generating new content. Just like during the original set up, new content, whether that is talks, outings, stories or more, must come from members.  It used to be JP, John and Frank being  the big contributors.  With their passing, the baton must pass to other members. The website team's responsibility (like mine was in the beginning) is to edit the website. They cannot and should not be responsible for generating content. 

With sincere thanks to all who have assisted in this ambitious endeavor. We believe we have the best Probus website in the country - if not the world!

Tony Heher

July 2026