Welcome to the new FDC site.

Features

• Glossary: Yes, the FDC glossary is back online.
• Member Profiles: All members get a listing, categorized by their level, and with tags indicating where you live and your union status.
• Beautiful: Don’t you love the new look? If you think something doesn’t look right, it might be because you’re using Internet Explorer. Try Firefox, it’s free and renders pages more accurately and quickly.
• Awesomeness: Need I say more?

Write a Page

Do you have a performance coming up? Are you teaching a workshop? Write an article about it and send it to communications@fdc.ca.

Members of FDC can write about anything they want, and I will post it. It has to be somehow related to stage combat, and cannot be offensive, but beyond that, I’m not picky.

• Congratulate students who got their certification
• Write a film review that had great or awful fights
• Tell everyone about an experience at a foreign workshop
• Conduct an interview with your fight instructor

Note that I won’t edit what you send me, so if you send a link to your workshop, I’ll just post the link. I’m not going to research and write your article for you. If you send images, I’ll do my best to incorporate them.

The Back-End

For those of you interested in the web-design and programming side of things, we are now using WordPress as the engine for the site.

When Nick Oddson was webmaster and made FDC’s first site, everything was static. It was beautiful and it worked every time, but there was no way for things to be categorized or ordered or searched very well. That meant that the site had to be small and not do much but convey information.

The reason I became webmaster was that I thought it would be a great move to put the glossary online, and the best way to do that would be with a wiki. At the time, Wikipedia was in the news, and I was aware that there were open wiki projects that could be easily installed. So I tried a couple and finally settled on TikiWiki. That proved to be too much of a problem to upkeep, and nobody seemed to be using the wiki. So I ditched that in favour of another CMS (content management system) called Joomla! It was supposed to be excellent for everything we needed. Unfortunately, the maintenance was killing me (and the site).

So now we’re on to WordPress. This is not just another experiment on my part. I use WordPress for my personal blog (DavidMcCormick.ca) and for my stage combat site (PlayFighting.ca) and my side project to help actors memorize Shakespeare (MemorizeShakespeare.com). So I have a lot of experience working with this system. This time, the site will be what it always should have been.

What I Need From You

You’ll see that all members get a profile page. Unlike the previous versions of the site, I’m not going to make you write your own page and figure out how to edit… just email me your bio and headshot, and I’ll do it for you. Your bio should include where you live and your union status so that I can put you in the right categories.

First, check in the Members directory for your name. If it’s not there, email Secretary@fdc.ca before you send me your bio. You need to be a member in good standing to get a page. That means paying your annual dues of $40.

Questions? Problems?

If you have an issue with the site, please let me know at webmaster@fdc.ca.