Depts

Made a few modifications to the undergrad index page (added links to pdf checklist files provided by dept) and the undergrad courses page (made controls at top of page for selecting which term's courses to display more obviously controls rather than text).

Trying to figure out the best way of handling gift subscriptions (i.e. person 1 at address 1 buys the subscription, but it goes to person 2 at address 2) After some experimenting, we discovered that the ref1 through ref5 values don't appear in the transaction details field in the admin interface, but the trnComments field does. The ref1 through ref5 values do show up in the confirmation notice that is sent, so they will use that to alert themselves to special treatment for gift subscriptions. They are still thinking about using the "shipping" address fields for the giftee's details, rather then asking for them separately in the comments field and then the user wondering about whether or not to fill in the "shipping" fields.

The Malahat Review wants to create two pages with special offers for contributors (subscriptions and issues) which connect to the shopping basket as usual. Problem is how to allow a user coming from either of those pages to get back from the basket to either of those pages, but not allow anyone getting to the basket from the normal products pages to get to the special offer pages.
I use the reserved field names in the get array to submit a value from the special pages to the basket and then added javascript code on the basket page so that if it finds the right value in the right variable in the get array, it then displays buttons which link back to the special pages. Obviously this could be extended for other special navigation requests in the future.

JSR enquired about suitability of uvic conference hosting service for review of abstracts. The software has those features. I've been involved in a conference (GRS) that used them sort-of for already submitted and approved abstracts just so the abstracts would appear to users. I seem to recall a problem uploading more than one attached file per submission (as in, I had to get the admin of the conference system to do it), but no other problems. I have never used them in earnest, but they should be adequate. Did some poking around with those features (users, user management, workflow management etc.).

code in course_list_generation.php assumes that the UVic calendar for the upcoming year will be posted by May 1. It wasn't, so my code failed. Temporarily changed this if($the_month < 5){ $calendarYearForWinter = $the_year - 1; to this if($the_month < 6){ $calendarYearForWinter = $the_year - 1; When UVic calendar went live, set that "6" back to "5". Also noticed that the integrateCoursesFromCalendar(winterList,summerList) simply returned the winter list, so had to write that method which copies winterList to ouputList, goes through each item in the summer list and if that item does not appear in the winterList, then append it to the outputList, and at the end of the loop sort the outputList and return it.

Dept wanted a URL that was associated with the dept site and simpler than the actual conference url on the conferences site
(http://conferences.uvic.ca/index.php/WCPA/wcpa2012)

so I created a simple setup in
http://web.uvic.ca/philosophy/wcpa
to redirect to the conference site

I put in an index.htm file with a redirect.
I also created a .htaccess file to catch any other URLs within that folder and redirect them to the home page on the conference site

ErrorDocument 404 http://conferences.uvic.ca/index.php/WCPA/wcpa2012

There is about a half-second lag while the redirect occurs, but I don't think that is long enough to bother your users.

courses_taught.php had the following line:
$professor['kluge'][3] = array ("208, "331"); //jan-apr
It was missing a quotation mark. I corrected it to look like this:
$professor['kluge'][3] = array ("208", "331"); //jan-apr
I also tidied up extra spacing and stuff just to make the file easier
for me to read.

1) I modified the detailed information for a single poem
(vpn-single-record.php) so that the "more information" link for the poem
appears only for those poems that have at least one link and not for
those poems that no links. compare
http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/?vpn_id=1096 and
http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/?vpn_id=1130
Similarly for the "more information" link on an author.

2) AC's convention for data entry is that if there is more than one link for a poem or an author, each is delimited by a carriage return (e.g Eliza Cook). I've added code on the results page to
look for carriage returns in the links field and create a new link when
it finds one, rather than make all the lines one big link to the first URL. For example, see the information on Cook, Eliza at
http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/?vpn_id=53

3) I've modified the vpn-search-results.php page so that if a poem has more than one author, only one instance of that poem appears in the listing in the search results page, e.g. Hidden Light.

I originally tried pruning out duplicates during the search procedure,
but the introduced a cascade of headaches. Instead, I decided to accept the results including duplicates and then prune any duplicates as they were being displayed and telling the user that's what I'm doing.

The result is that the total number of hits is still reported (e.g. 2 in the case of Hidden Light), and a message is appended saying the number of duplicate entries which are not being displayed (e.g. 1 in the case of Hidden Light). That's so that from the user's perspective the number of items in the listing don't inexplicably go out of sync with the reporting and navigation schemes. For example, if the query returned 12 hits, 2 of which were duplicates, the user would expect to see 10 hits and then 2 hits. If they got 10 and then 1, they'd be puzzled. My hope is that adding a note about hiding the duplicates will resolve the puzzle for them.

EGW students did interviews of retired people. Got 20 interviews from Judy as mp3 files, Greg made copy of each to wav file, resulting in a total of 40 files and 11 gigs of data. After some back and forth with LW of archives, arranged to deliver the files. Took them over on a USB stick and transferred them.