Activating Changes
Why do my changes not show up?
When I make changes to the menu listings for my info items, I don't see the changes on screen?
How long does it take for a change to show up in the system?
When you work on editing the Info Pages and make changes to Basic Site Settings, your changes are instantly recorded in the database. There is no "lag time" for changes to become effective. But, in order to see the changes on the end user site, you may need to refresh/reload your site.
For the most part, your entire registration system is dynamic in that there are constant calls to the database to update your screen. So when you switch messages, the program goes out to the database, gets the new text for the message and loads the page. This is in contrast to a file-based system where your browswer is simply reading files.
But there are many aspects of the site that only need to be read once and are not constantly changing, but are used often. For example, the "headings" that appear in your left menu bar do not change as you move from page to page. Or the email address used for the contact us button.
In order to minimize the calls to the database, some of these items are obtained once when you first land at the site and then simply read from memory. So as you are working on building your site, if you add a new menu item in the info section or activate a new module, it will not appear until you reload the site. Although a hassle during the design stage, it does make for faster navigation for the end user once up and running.
There are four ways to refresh/reload the site.
- Login to the site. Your site settings are reloaded each time you initiate a new login to the site. This is the easiest way to refresh/reload the site. If you are already logged in, simply log out and log in again.
- Close your browser and reload again from scratch. Using this method you can be certain that your site is fresh. It has to be loaded from scratch. See note below regarding your cache.
- Go back to the site index. In the URL line for your site, there is a root site. If you type in just the root, it should take you to an index page from which you can reload your site. For example, if your url reads, "http://www.intre.org/info.php?msg=67&s=99", if you typed in "http://www.intre.org" it will load the index page and you can choose your site.