Your area site is now a part of the integrated MKP USA Multisite Network. Your new web address carolinas.mkpusa.org. Your old website (carolinas.mkp.org) will now be redirected to the MKPUSA.org domain.
Why Is This Happening?
The Mankind Project has many audiences: warrior brothers, the general public, local communities and constituencies and non-warrior men seeking a men’s circle are just a few. For the New Warrior Brother, MKPConnect.org is the system for communicating and keeping track of the network, but this system is not open to the general public. You must be a warrior brother and have a login to MKPConnect to access any of its capabilities.
To maintain a public face for MKP, the ManKind Project (in the days before MKP USA) set up over 35 WordPress web sites to be managed by local communities, areas, and regions around the world. Many of the centers have made great use of these sites, some have not used them as much.
As the Unification process unfolded in MKP USA, independent Centers became Areas, and newly formed Communities began chartering across the country. Communities were looking for a presence on the web. New Warriors were looking for easier ways to find information. Areas were looking for better ways to manage this brand new network of communities and communicate to everyone! It became clear that managing, updating, and coordinating individual WordPress websites was a big technical challenge (and big opportunity for increased communication!) that could be shared between MKP USA, Areas, and communities.
This is where I come in. I’m Bob Jones.
In January of 2014, I was invited to join the Area Stewardship Council for the newly unified Northwest Area and I took over management of our area’s website at nw.mkp.org. I realized that this site was a key element in helping improve communications within the Northwest Area and set about adding capabilities to our site that would make it easier for us to communicate and do our work. With buy-in from MKP USA, I created a WordPress Plugin called “MKPConnect Plugin” that allowed our site to pull data from the MKPConnect.org website and make that data available to visitors to our site.
Based on the work I did for the Northwest Area, I was asked by MKP USA to make the MKPConnect Plugin available to all unified areas within MKP USA. As part of this process, we realized that we could cut costs, make maintenance and upgrading easier, and improve our communications capabilities by migrating the individual area websites into a centrally managed network of sites. This migration is now nearing completion.
The final phase in this process is to activate the new networked websites one-by-one and redirect the old sites. In Los Angeles, that step is now completed.
