Update of Humanities Sites

Still trying to work out how the code for images is created on map pages in the thomson site. The "associate image with page" feature shows that the images which should be appearing on the problematic pages are associated with document id 0. I've asked Amanuel that if I assign those to the right document ID, is that all I have to do.

Also noticed that the site on the development tree has been rebuilt so the files I fixed manually have been overwritten with the empty image div. We have to figure out this issue before I can migrate to the publicly accessible instance of the site.

SA came down enquiring about creating pages on their site based on images (e.g. a map of Paris or flooplan of a cathedral, or a scalable timeline) such that when the user hovers or clicks on features in the image, further information appears. That information would be brief text and links to resources on the web on that feature. We looked at the mariage.uvic.ca, a map of Canada with clickable elements at http://www.speakwell.com/ipedcanada/views/tour.asp and at mapoflondon.

We also talked about the division of labour (content, structure, appearance, functionality) for such a project and what the HCMC could do to support each of those.

She will talk with her chair and work out in more detail what exactly they want to do and then get back to me.

Department produced a new student handout booklet. Consists of five word files. Combined those into one file, then created a PDF of that and uploaded it. Then did global search and replace in site to point to new generic file name (studiesinphil.pdf) instead of studiesinphil07.pdf.

Also added two new pages on graduate student information, modified the navigation bar appropriately and cleaned up the code on those three pages, which had been generated in MSWord.

Spent a good part of the day editing a copy of the philosophy department site so that the courses offered in the summer session are displayed separately from the courses offered in the winter session. A lot of editing to the files:
web_pages/courses.php
web_pages/graduate_courses.php
web_pages/courses_by_prof.php
script_files/php/course_list_generation.php

Took two old variables for calendar and folder pointers and created four (2 for summer session and 2 for winter session)
Took old PHILcourses.inc file and replaced it with PHILcoursesSummer.inc and PHILcoursesWinter.inc.
Updated the courses_offered.php page to replace the array offered_courses with offered_courses_winter and offered_courses_summer
Updated the courses_taught.php page to replace something like this:
$professor['barnes'] = array ("Barnes, Allison","260","261","311","362");
with something like this:
$professor['brown'][0] = "Brown, Karen";
$professor['brown'][1] = array("100","260","261"); //winter session
$professor['brown'][2] = array("100"); //summer session

All working except for the the courses_by_prof.php page which is failing utterly. Some array pointers to the $professors array have to be fixed and I'm suspicious about the variable $prof, which is obtained from either get_results.php or get_results2.php

Added an entry for John Lutz's new book to the book gallery page on the history site.

Used a graphics editor program to create two images of the book cover from the large (about 1500 by 1900 pixel) original. lutz_makuk_sm.jpg appears on the index page and is about 140 by 180 px; lutz_makuk_med.jpg appears on the details page and is about 280 by 360 px.
Uploaded the two images to the book_images folder on the site. Ensured the file permissions were correct.

Copied the file lutz_myth_memory.html from the site.
Renamed it lutz_makuk.html.
Edited that file with the new content and a pointer to the new image file lutz_makuk_med.jpg.
Uploaded the file to the site. Ensured the file permissions were correct.

Downloaded the book_index.html file.
Copied a td element to the start of the table.
Moved the /tr and tr tags so that each tr element contained three td elements.
Edited that element with the correct details for John's book and a pointer to the image file lutz_makuk_sm.jpg and a link on that image to the file lutz_makuk.html.
Uploaded the file to the server.

Checked everything in a browser.

For French site, started by testing the connection keys to make sure they'd work. In doing that I discovered that the professor pages and dt dd elements, which Contribute can't deal with, so I changed all those to ul and li elements. Contribute indented each li relative to the one before it, making the page illegible. It did the same thing with lists created in Contribute. So, I decided to make the lists of publications simply p tags.

Also added some rules to the css and modified the specifiers for a couple of existing rules. The rules for plain ul and li tags generated styles suitable for the nav bar but not for body content, so I added a specifier to those rules to apply them only in the nav bar object. I added a couple of rules specifically to handle list of li items and p tags in the prof_stuff div, which appears only in the professor pages.

Also tested the keys for the professors to make sure they had the right capabilities - had to add "allow user to publish" to a couple of them.

Talked with PaulVH on problems administering users and connections in Contribute. He confirmed similar problems involving pathnames and urls. We also did some testing with file permissions on the server and with email addresses for the user of the key and those didn't seem to have any effect.

I installed Contribute on an Intel Mac laptop and the program installed properly (as opposed to the PowerPC G5 where it does not seem to install properly).
Then I tried to create a connection to the French site. When I provided this for the URL to the site:
http://web.uvic.ca/french
at the start of the wizard, then later when it came to specifying the path on the server, everything went well
If I specified
http://web.uvic.ca/french/web_pages/index.php (which is the actual URL of the page - the index.htm page at the root is a redirect to web_pages/index.php)
then later when I specified the path, I got the "could not confirm" error message.

So, it seems that when I provide the exact information on the URL and path of the home page, Contribute is deriving paths from that information which are wrong, whereas if I provide the url and path to the root of the site and let Contribute work out the redirects itself, it gets that right.

Finished work on grabbing all events from UVic events calendar, then filter those that belong to department calendars I care about and then sort them by date and by department then date. Wrote to Dave W to confirm approach is sound before suggesting to Jennifer.
Plan is to create a calendar on the uvic system for each of the "sponsors" (i.e. depts, centres etc.), and put Jennifer and the relevant dept secretary (and possibly me) as users on each group. Then any authenticated user can post an event to the appropriate calendar. My code on the index and events pages in the hums site would then scrape that information and present it appropriately.
Advantages are that data is entered only once; is available on uvic site, hums site and if desired dept site; can be edited in one place by dept or faculty secretary (or me possibly).

Sarah called to ask how to use Jennifer's contribute setup to edit files in the Humanities site. Showed her how to get a contribute session going (through a button in the toolbar in FireFox as it turned out), and how to use the contribute editor to edit text, create links, create anchors etc.

Only significant problem is that when I add her netlink ID to the htaccess file in the admin folder, she is unable to authenticate. She is able to authenticate on the netlink.uvic.ca page, but not in the humanities site. Helpdesk had no answer. I tried adding lang02 to the htaccess file and that worked, so it's not simply a time-lag problem. Unless she is entering her password incorrectly (unlikely as she's authenticating on netlink page), there must be something weird about her account. Will follow up with sysadmin.

The ISE search system is a temporary hack I wrote as an example of what might be done using eXist, but it's now running live on the site. It's using very old data, but the latest versions of the play files are too complicated to be inserted, so I've written some basic XSLT that strips out all the joinID attributes to simplify them. Running that, and fixing some XML errors in the original files, allows me to insert all but one of the files into the old eXist. The one remaining file is clearly disfunctional, so there's not much I can do with it.

Now the question is how to test this. I've got the new plays in a separate collection from the old ones, and with a modern eXist, I'd just rename the two collections, but the old version doesn't let me do that, so I'd have to delete the old ones and then replace them with the new, leaving the search functionality broken for a period. Waiting for updates from the ISE folks on whether there's a better approach using isebeta.

Updated the GRS Website with some new photos and a newsletter, sent by SB.

DS noted that in PIR site some browsers are having problems with javascript's document.lastModified method, so I replaced javascript based on this call:
var d = new Date(document.lastModified);

with php using this:
<?php
$filename = 'Call.php';
if (file_exists($filename)) {
echo "Updated: " . date ("d F Y", filemtime($filename));
}
?>

Added five year's worth of files on French Graduate Collouqiua to the French Department site. Entailed adding the header of many files to include references to the css, js etc. files in the new french web site. Because the grad colloquium pages are embedded in subfolders, also entailed modifying the header code in those files and in the menu.php file. Added snippet of code to handle $level = "L3" and to process paths correctly based on that value of that variable.

I updated the navigation and presentation for 2008 and 2007 colloquia. For earlier years, I removed problematic code and left the pages as plain html with no navigation to rest of site.

The image in the banner and the reference to the last updated code still needs to be modified to handle files calling it from other than the root of the web_pages folder (i.e. the index.php in the grad_colloquim folder at level L2 and the yearly subfolders of that folder at level L3).

I used css to hide the language-switch controls - when the dept has the French language content ready and imported into the documents, the css can be modified to make those controls visible.

The old site was in the web folder. I put the new one in the www folder and then had the webadmins change the symbolic link to point to the www folder.

I zipped the web folder (the old site) and put the zip file into the root of the account. An earlier incarnation of the site exists as another zip file. I then cleared out the web folder and place an index.htm redirect file, though it should be impossible to get to it in a browser.

Successfully established a connection in Contribute using http://web.uvic.ca/~athena, so I could edit pages. However, I could not assign an administrator, as Contribute told me it could not find a "guard page". Tried various experiements, and Contribute is finding things in the web directory in that account no problem, but is not finding things in the www directory. I suspect problem may be with the url containing a tilde, or with the fact that the web folder already contains the _mm folder used by Contribute, though I have no idea why either would be a problem.

I'll wait until Joe (webadmin@uvic.ca) changes the symbolic link so that I can use the url web.uvic.ca/grs/ to point to the www folder in Contribute. That change by Joe will likely mean that the current contribute configuration they are using will fail, as it is expecting web.uvic.ca/grs to point to the web directory in athena, not the www directory.

Downloaded grs site from www0 in lang02 and then uploaded it into the www directory in the athena account. The old site is in the web directory in the athena account. The url web.uvic.ca/grs is a symbolic link to the athena/web, so I sent a request to webadmin@uvic.ca so change that symbolic link to point to athena/www. Once that is done, then the new site will be visible to all.

Put some text into the home page to replace the Lorem Ipsum that was there.

It turns out there are Dreamweaver templates and Contribute templates, and the two are not the same thing. According to DW documentation, you must use a DW template to create a file if you want Contribute to recognize instructions for editable and non-editable areas in the document. It looks like the presence of the InstanceBegin and InstanceEnd comments are the critical factor.

To get contribute to recognize instructions, you need an InstanceBegin comment immediately following the html declaration and an InstanceEnd comment immediately preceding the close html declaration, i.e.:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><!-- InstanceBegin -->
<!-- InstanceEnd --></html>

To make an area editable, enclose it in InstanceBeginEditable comment with a unique name attribute, e.g.:

<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="EditRegion1" -->
<p>I have edited this in dw. and this bit in Contribute. </p>
<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

As far as I can see no other files need to be present, let alone be in any state or contain any specific information.

I moved the humanities site from the dev directory in their account to the production directory. This caused a number of hassles with Contribute, so in the future I recommend:
- find the _mm directory in the root of the moved site and delete it (that dir contains a lot of information about Contribute users and settings which are no longer valid)
- in Contribute, remove any connections to the site, then create a new connection and establish yourself as administrator (deleting the _mm dir on the server causes Contribute to think anyone can be an administrator)
- in Contribute, ensure each user has the privileges you want, then create connection key(s) for each of the kinds of users you want
- test the keys, then issue them

Modified css rules for hilited text and paragraph based on request from Jennifer.

Tested editing .inc files in Contribute (specifically the section navigation bar files). Modified various items in navigation bars using Contribute, tested to make sure resulting pages worked properly and then showed Jennifer how she could make the same kind of edits in Contribute.

I caused problem for Jennifer by creating two links to the same page. Jennifer thought there were two separate pages so deleted some information from the page thinking only one of two copies of the file would be affected. Sorted that out.

Fixing various minor issues on philosophy site, such as:
- updating the js arrays for courses offered and coursed taught by each instructor
- scaling, cropping and uploading professor images
- investigating reports of edits made in FCK editor that subsequently disappear again from site; can't reproduce that behaviour, so followed up with Liz, who couldn't reproduce it either. She'll send more detailed report if it happens again

Second half of testing in preparation for putting FCK editor into pages on french site. For first half of testing, see post "test 2 FCK editors on one page".

I modified the settings.php and ajax_methods.js files, and created an indexBOTH.php file. The files were modified to allow for a value of "both_lang" in the $SESSION[language] variable. The indexBOTH page now allows the user to select French, English or Both and displays appropriately by hiding and showing the French and English divs appropriately.

By combining this with the 2 editors in one page code I'm testing in the philosophy site (because there is no FCK editor code at all in the French site right now), the result will be the ability to edit both the French and the English texts in separate editor boxes on the page in the browser.

In the philosophy account, I created index_test.php and web_page_text/index_test.inc. The php file is identical to index.php with the following exceptions:
- addition of a call to index_test.php
- addition of code to create a second instance of an FCK editor, that instance points to index_test.php
The index_test.inc file is identical to index.inc with the exception of some text changes I made just to make it obvious the new file is being read.

When I log in, I get the two editors, each displaying the appropriate source file and saving changes properly. I'll combine this knowledge with that gained on the French site (see posting on "test both languages visible in French site") for possible deployment on the French site to support editing French and English texts in separate boxes on the page in the browser.

Further to a previous posting, you must use the URL box in the advanced section of the insert link dialog to include a relative link. If you put the relative link into the link box in the basic section of the insert link dialog, Contribute precedes the relative link with the "http://" protocol.

I further discovered (with Jennifer's assistance) that to create a link to an anchor within the same document:
- create the anchor first using the "Section Anchor" item in the insert menu of contribute
- select text for link, choose link-web page, open the advanced part of the dialog and then insert the name of the file (even if it is the same file as you're editing)
- by inserting the file name, Contribute finds the anchor tags in the specified document and populates a dropdown list in the advanced section of the dialog; you then select the anchor.

We also confirmed that Contribute is 'smart' about relative URLs and tends to make a relative rather than absolute URL wherever possible.

Did some research Monday and then met with Jennifer today.
Contribute appears to have no way of allowing you to see the file-and-folder tree, so the only way to address a file included by a php call is to manually enter the url of the included file into the URL box in the Contribute editor.
If the file is a well-formed xhtml structure, though not a full dom, (e.g. an unordered list), then the file will open for reading though what appears may be the xhtml code or may be the default parsing and representation of a list. The file can also be edited, and always is parsed for presentation in the editor (e.g. lists show up as lists and links show up as coloured, underlined text, neither show up in the editor as xhtml code). Changes are saved OK.
Jennifer OK with editing the section nav bar files in each section in this way if necessary. We discussed treating certain elements of page content which are repeated (e.g. department listing) by decided to leave them as duplicate hard-coded instances for the time being.

Created and sent a Contribute Connection key to Jennifer, who got going with it. After trying it for a while she asked for additional capabilities, so I opened Contribute using the Administrator Connection key, then modified the attributes on the Publisher user to allow deleting of files, uploading of non-webpage files.
I also set that user to look at only one css file (humanities_contribute.css) for styles to include in the styles dropdown. I then moved a small number of styles from humanities.css to humanities_contribute.css. I then modified all the php pages on the site to include both the css files. Any style that is in that css file will appear in the dropdown in Contribute. I'll move or add styles based on input from Jennifer.
Sent Jennifer an updated Contribute Connection key for the Publisher user on that site.

Created pages and ported information for the researchers section of the Humanities site. I've pretty well done all I can do on that site for the moment. Jennifer is working on the resource handbook, and I've no content or instructions on the Alumni/Community and Chairs/Staff sections.

Also updated a few navigation and other elements throughout the site based on conversation with Claire.

Tried editing some of the pages for the new humanities site using Contribute. The styletag dropdowns are not intuitive, but seem to work more or less. Have not tested styling using spans, but block elements are working and selecting text and applying an em tag is working.

Creating a relative link to a pdf, rtf or doc file requires that you open the link window to a web page on site, then click the advanced button and enter the filename in the href field - leave the URL field empty. If you try to put the filename in the href field you get a malformed URL because Contribute prepends the "http://" protocol wrongly.

To use Contribute, easiest thing is to get the appropriate "connection key" file from Stew's mac. They have the extension ".stc". I've created on for the publisher role (can edit pages quite fully, but can't create or delete pages) and the administrator role (full edit, creation and deletion).

To create new roles or edit a role, you have to be using Contribute as a Contribute_admin. To do that, drag and drop the admin stc file on the Contribute application icon. Contribute allows only one connection file to point to the same URL (Don't know why), so you may be prompted about that. Once Contribute is running as an Administrator, choose Apple-Administer Websites to get the user/role admin window.

By the way, the instance of Contribute on my Mac still won't launch properly, but I have been able to run the (as far as I know identical) instance on Cortland remotely with success.

Clifton and I met James Young to get his input on desired features in new phil site:
- add a prominent link to graduate programs on the home page or side nav bar
- add contact info for dept chair, graduate advisor and undergraduate advisor on contact page (Liz can provide details)
- remove the FAQ
- change the word "news" to "events" in the top navigation bar
- for the faculty section:
- have a page listing the faculty members, divided in sections for "regular faculty", "emeritus", "sessional", and "grad students"
- each entry includes name, contact info and a link to that person's page on the phil site
- each person's page includes areas of interest, courses taught, photo (if available), cv or link to cv (if available), etc.

added a couple of new pages to student section and ported data. Also normalized and updated listings in the section_nav_bar file for each section.
These pages now up to date:
aboutus/departments.php
aboutus/centres.php
student/advising.php
student/ugradprograms.php
student/services.php
student/gradprograms.php

Reviewed philosophy site and then talked with Clifton on phone while going through his work on the "edit on the page" feature on the new philosophy site. He's got the the course description and handouts for each professor's offering of each course working - not sure if the graduate courses page is working yet, but that will be exactly the same. Next is the course offerings per professor.

Clifton also looking at putting the entire static html of other pages into a big editing block at the bottom of the page. Issue there is that the editor does not facilitate using classes and tags (other than the standard ones provided in xhtml). Still may be worth the experiment to see what happens.

With Martin's help:
1) added the xslt to generate a class="GridTable" attribute to the table tag in the xhtml when the xml data file contained a rend="grid" attribute in the table tag. Also added the necessary css rules to the global.css.php file.

2) Ran into a problem with our sorting by reg and sorting by sortKey code. The output was sorted correctly, but the highlighting in the GUI (alternating rows) was based on the original sort order, so sometimes you'd get two consecutive rows of the same colour instead of alternating. Because the php combines xsl and hard-coded xhtml in the query to the database, this couldn't be solved in the code. Instead, we sorted the data in the locations and persons files INDEX1.xml and PERS1.xml into alphabetical order based on the keys, so that no sorting on the fly by would be required. This has the implication that if new entries are added to these files, they have to be inserted in the right order in the data file.

Passed the new schema on to Melanie, so she can start adding reg elements to the persName elements. Helped Stew with some XSLT, XQuery and PHP stuff on tables and sorting.

There is basic table code in some of the pages which is not being rendered, so I dug out some of my old XSLT for tables from ACH, and passed it over to Stew.

Then we got on to dealing with some annoying sorting issues. Names (of streets, people etc.) are sorted in a crude alphabetical manner, so (for instance) a name beginning with "St." sorts after "Soper" instead of before it. People's names are sorted based on first name.

As far as the people are concerned, the fix has to be made in the data, because there's no algorithm that can determine how to break up a name for searching. Melanie will add a <reg> element to all <persName> elements, and we'll sort on that. Before that could happen, though, we had to make <reg> available in the schema, so we had to retrieve Eric's ODD file and modify it to re-include that element, which he'd removed from the core module. That's now done, so Melanie can start adding <reg> elements.

For place names, the solution should have been simple enough, but we hit three major limitations: first, we can't use XSLT 2.0 because we're running under PHP, which relies on xsltproc; second, in many cases the separation of concerns is rather broken, because XQuery is spitting out HTML directly instead of there being an intermediary XSLT process; and third, it seems to be impossible to pass custom XQuery functions (as opposed to plain inline code) into eXist through the mechanism PHP is using, so an XQuery hack is unworkable.

The only practical solution was to modify the data, which in this case is a large non-TEI file which indexes places against coordinates on the map (INDEX1.xml). I wrote some XSLT 2 to process this file locally, in order to add a <sortKey> element for each <title> element, in which any instances of "The " at the beginning are moved to the end, "St. " is expanded, and the whole string is upper-cased. These are now hard-coded into the data, and are being used to sort the names. They're still displaying in their normal form ("St. Vedast"), but they're sorted based on the key ("SAINT VEDAST").

Working with the PHP interface is more difficult than working in Cocoon, because you can't easily hack into the middle of a pipeline and look at what you're getting; the XQuery and XSLT processing all take place inside a single PHP file, rather than a true pipeline, so it's harder to see what's happening in the middle. On balance, having some experience with both approaches, I'd say the Cocoon system is far superior, especially as it allows you to choose your XSLT processor at any point in any pipeline, so we can hook in Saxon 8 for XSLT 2 files whenever we need to.

Me too for this post.

Melanie asked about getting rid of extraneous spaces following instances of names in references, for example in HENS2.xml:
<ref type="internal" target="render_page.php?id=HENS2&n=12"><name type="person" key="ALLE2">Edward Alleyn</name></ref>

After much struggle by me and Martin looking through the XSLT, the php XQuery we eventually concluded that the problem must be a bug in the php or libxsl library. We were able to solve the problem by adding
<xsl:strip-space elements="tei:ref"/>
to render_page.xsl

I copied the front-end files for Agenda from the lang02 account to the lang account, checked the permissions were identical and a select sample of the actual files were identical.

The instance on lang02 works fine, except when there is a conflict with a current session from the lang account - in which case a php Warning of access denied to the session tmp file on the server appears on the page. The occasional problem is likely due to reuse of session variables arising from testing, and unlikely to occur in normal use - the lang02 instance hasn't failed before.

The instance on lang is suffering from something else: the index file includes a login file which creates a new session, logs in to the database, authenticates the user and populates the session array, then calls the agenda.php page. The agenda.php calls new session and creates a new db object (just as the instance in lang02 account does). However the difference is that the SESSION array has no values in the lang account, but does in the lang02 account. With no SESSION values, virtually none of the GUI of the agenda page is displayed.

After much testing and conversations with Clifton, I wrote to sys-admins to see if they could report anything about the lang account that might explain its behaviour, or anything about the php service that might explain any of the behaviour we're getting.

Claire reports that Andrew is happy with the structure we've implemented. She asked to move a couple of topics around.

Discussed flow of content and data over the next couple of months to result in site ready to go before September.

Also talked about involvement of Jennifer in maintenance of the content and how the design of the site needs to be sensitive to her interests and abilities in doing maintenance. She'll be involved again in July.

Added a "for administrators" section, which I'd forgotten to do yesterday, added and moved pages as needed.

Implemented the red colour provided by Andrew
pantone 492 = 78171A hex = 150-23-26 decimal
Three instances in the humanties.css file and then edits to two image files bottom-corner.gif and top-corner.gif
I used 150-69-78 and 150-92-104 as greyed out versions of that red for aliasing round corners in the bottom-corner and top-corner image files.
The text colour in the footer no longer works with the red, so I changed it to 999999.
The former blue background colour was 6666CC and the text colour in the footer was 003399.

The English dept is rewriting is hiring contractors to rewrite its dept site over the summer and wants the HCMC to be able to maintain the site if needbe.

English intends to include the ability to scrape the Calendar site for course listings and allow browser-based editing of limited bits of text in the site. These features we also have and hope to have (respectively) in the new phil site, so we'll be able to compare the two implementations and learn from that.

The HCMC is willing to take on the role of maintaining the site on three conditions:

1) The HCMC needs to have approval on the specifications for any parts of the site that we will be expected to maintain. In particular, we need to know what technology is intended to implement the "spider" and "browser-editing" abilities.

2) The developers must provide full technical documentation on their work. I can provide more details on the kind of documentation (both in the code and as separate files) that we'd expect - it's nothing beyond industry standards, but the long-term well-being of the site will depend on it.

3) The site be hosted on uvic's main web hosting computer. If the site is housed outside of the university, then the HCMC will have to review whether it can commit to maintenance as the costs to the HCMC of working with non-UVic sys-admins are considerably higher than working with UVic sys-admins.

Corey ran a couple of queries against the authentication service and sent me the results. One is for all people with a "faculty" affiliation with at least one of a list of department codes he tries; the other is all people with a "non-instructional" affiliation. Some departments had dozens of names in the latter list, so I asked the philosophy department secretary to confirm who the 20-odd people on their list were: grad students employed by the dept, adjunct faculty, sessionals, department secretaries etc. The authentication system has no finer-grained characterization.

I summarized the results and emailed Jennifer and Andrew with the options. Also got a list of all dept codes used in the authentication system which I'll get to Jennifer for her to select those associated with the faculty of Humanities and confirmed from Corey that he is willing to including a list of hard-coded netlink-ids if he has to

Created an administrator role for each of two hums instances (one in lang02, one in hums), then created a published role for each of those. Created a "connection key" file for each of those four (file that launches the app, connects to the site, specifies what that user is allowed to to do, and asks for authentication).
Able to prevent user from creating new page or applying any kind of styling other than those elements and classes appearing in the dropdown list derived from the css file.
No improvement on the problems of not knowing what element the cursor is currently in and no way of modifying attributes that aren't visible (e.g. id's of instances or comments)

Using copy of hums site running in lang02 account (which contribute can successfully connect to - as opposed to copy of same files in hums site), tested to see how Contribute deals with css on standard xhtml elements and elements with classes.

In summary, it's going to be extremely difficult to use Contribute to maintain a site with typical css styling (e.g. the template files provided by web coordinator's office).
All the elements and classes appear in a drop-down list ready to apply, but there is no indication in the Contribute GUI of which elements and classes are applied to the current focus point. E.g. if the cursor is in an instance of an H2, the dropdown menu shows the current style as "bodytext", but if I choose H3, the tag is applied and the proper styling applied too. I see no way of having Contribute show me anything about the element with focus (let alone the tree for that element).

Checked the code generated by Contribute, and it is adding hard-coded style attributes into the xhtml which overwrite those in the style sheet for that element. E.g. the H3 tag in the css has margin settings, but the instance created by Contribute manually over-rides those with different margin settings. This happened even when I copied and pasted a selection. The duplicate had hard-coded style attributes not there in the original.

I could find no way of seeing html comments in Contribute, which means I cannot leave instructions as html comments, nor can I include templates as comments in the code. This compounds the problem noted above where copy and paste does not produce two identical instances of the object. I don't know if there's any way to edit e.g. the id attribute of an instance of an element in Contribute.

Revised the menu structure based on meeting of last week.
Added new Researcher section.
Ported bunch of data from old Humanities site into faculty section to give client a sense of how things will appear.
Also ported some data into Contact Us and Site Map pages.
Modified css files to incorporate specific shade of blue found on current site - entailed a few changes to the xhtml files in the site as well.

Based on success at working around problem in Contribute with php files. I rewrote all the files in the hums site to get rid of the included html files and instead put that content into the php files. I also put a hardcoded call to the humanities.css file in each page (rather than in an included php file) so that Contribute could see that call and use the stylesheet in its editor.

I'm now ready to implement the structural changes discussed with the dean last week and think I've reached the best possible compromise to allow me to edit the mechanically complex parts of the page and Jennifer to edit the contents.

Greg and I think we've figured out how to prevent the problem - ensure SFTP is set as the protocol when creating the connection. If it is not, then delete the connection and create a new one from scratch. Do not simply edit the protocol in the Edit Connection window.

Test results:

If I create a connection and specify SFTP at that time, then I can successfully publish php files.
If I create a connection and specify FTP, and then immediately edit that connection so the upload protocal is SFTP, then I cannot successfully publish php files.
So, Contribute must be configuring the permissions based on the protocol when the connection is created and then failing to modify the permissions configuration if the protocol is changed later. I'll do a bit more testing and let you know if I discover anything further.

Likely culprit:

In this folder

[currentUser]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Contribute 4/Configuration

(note two space characters in that pathname)

is a file called ssh_hosts, which I'm guessing is at the root of the problem. Our theory is that file cannot be edited or can be edited in only certain ways, and that those restrictions explain the "permissions configuration fails to update when protocol changes from FTP to SFTP" problem. The other option is that there is simply some bug in Contribute causing it to fail to update the hash in that ssh_hosts file when the protocol is changed.

Reviewed prototype with Dean Rippin and Jennifer Leffler.

Make colour scheme like the current hums site rather than that provided by the template defaults.
Maintain top-level tabs for audience, include the word "for" in the tab.
Maintain small number of links in second nav bar on left side, common to all pages on the site.

Focus on the Faculty section first:
- will have to look into restricting access to certain portions of the site to members of faculty of Humanities (not students), possibly by making use of the central authentication system

- provided revised list of subsections for that section
Faculty

• Dates and Deadlines
• Career Opportunities
• Awards and Fellowships
• Forms
• Meetings
• Policies : safety
• Handbooks: for all faculty, for new faculty, for chairs
• Computing
• link to Research section

- Add a Researcher section

• Portraits of Reseachers
• Research Sites
• Collectives
• Grant Sources
• Publications
• Scottish Studies

- move list of departments to aboutus, add link to Calendar to Student section

Contribute changes the file permissions on upload to include group write.
This conflicts with the security settings allowed by the php installation on the uvic server (for good reason). The group-write permission is what generates the internal server error.
Greg and I looked up the adobe knowledgebase, where we found some information that we could get a sysadim to change settings for the account for the umask, and Contribute "would respect" those settings. Even if true, not what I want to do, so decided on php with included htms for editable bits.

Created php files which include htm files for content and for title, and include .inc files for everything else.
Put editable htm files into an html folder inside each of the four section folders to simplify finding the files for Jennifer.
Created new site with four sections and minimal dummy data.

Tested two approaches:
1) php template using a lot of php includes for all the shared content and unique content hard-coded
2) php template containing all the static content and then a php include for the unique information
Former has advantage of one copy of shared content, but Contribute can't make sense of what's left.
Latter works in Contribute, but has disadvantage that every page has hard-coded all the common stuff.
Installed DW to see if there were some way to create in DW a php page that gave me the advantages of only one shared source, but which appeared to Contribute in a way it could deal with it, no success.

So, I think I'll just have to go with a template for each section, each containing all the common code, with php includes for the nav and css specific to each section. Editing of common bits will have to be by multi-file search and replace.

Got Contribute to "connect to" files in the lang02 account.
Spent a bit of time getting used to the Contribute interface and to the tags in the html that Contribute is sensitive to, specifically <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="tabs" -->
Tested what happens with php files being edited in Contribute. Results seem promising: Contribute viewer displays the php-generated material properly, Contribute editor replaces each instance of php code with a php icon that is non editable or deletable.
Include files have to have a .htm or .php extension (not .inc) for the Contribute editor to parse them rather then show the source code.
Also grabbed three generic banner images for the student, faculty and public sections.
Next on to analyzing which bits of the template files I can extract.

Reviewed specs and templates. Have to decide whether to modify them as little as possible, even though they're kludgy vs. modify them radically to streamline them.

Tried to get Contribute installed and working - failed on my mac, but worked on Cortland (helpdesk and cstore had no reports of similar and neither I nor Greg could find reports in the knowledgebase or the web).

Created a couple of little files in a folder in lang02.

Almost, but not quite succeeded in getting Contribute to "connect" to those files, which is preliminary to editing them.

Took all the elements of the existing site and placed them as appropriate in normalized structure. A handful of elements are orphans, so I'll need to check with Jennifer and Andrew about them. The list of departments and list of faculty members and research interests should probably be combined and centralized somehow as they appear for all three audiences. I'll use that as my data for testing inclusions in Contribute.
I'll review this in a day or two, but expect that I won't be able to proceed on this until I've got the templates, got a copy of Contribute and have spent time seeing what happens in Contribute when I make various kinds of modifications to the templates (specifically making the files php rather than html).

As optimal structuring of data may entail duplicate presentation of blocks of content, research into how best to do that in a way compatible with Contribute.

PHP with html includes

Task completed 30 jan 2007

INITIATION:
Dean Rippin's request

OBJECTIVES:
Goal is to update the website for the Faculty of Humanities to ease maintenance and to optimize the content and structure for each of three specific audiences

PARTICIPANTS:
Andrew Rippin to set objectives and review prototypes, Jennifer Lefler to review for maintainability as she'll be maintaining the content of the site.
Robin Sutherland of web coordinator's office providing templates for UVic standard site.
Stewart will take those templates and create site within them to meet objectives. Will also use project to become familiar with the templates and with the Contribute editor, specifically testing Contribute's abilities with php. Content similar to current, but updated where necessary and centralized where possible.

COMMITMENT:
Andrew Rippin and Jennifer Lefler already maintaining current site (using Contribute) and intend to continue to do so as much as possible.
Jennifer and Andrew willing to apply their current knoweldge of content editing to this new site and to learn enough to do that.

TECHNOLOGY:
Based on UVic standard template, though may be modified to support php includes.
Site will be hosted on unix.uvic.ca

FUNDING AND RESOURCES:
HCMC time and resources out of normal operating budget.

MILESTONES AND END OF THE PROJECT:
Analysis of content and proposed new structure: end of Dec 06
Research into Contribute and how best to use it for this site: end of Dec 06
Prototype approved: end of January 07
Completion of site: end of February 07
Training on maintenance of content: March 07
Likely target date for end of project: March 2007

CRITERIA FOR CESSATION OF PROJECT:
In the unlikely event that the web coordinator announces new templates during the course of this project, this project will be suspended to determine which templates to use.

FIT WITH EXISTING WORK:
Will allow Stewart to become refamiliarized with templates and in better position to comment on needed changes for new templates
Will allow Stewart to become familiar with capabilities and limits of Contribute, and with writing pages (in whatever editor) that are amenable to content editing in Contribute

Met with Andrew Rippin on his requirements for the Humanities website:

• maintain 3 target audiences
• target information more precisely at each of three
• scope of current content about right
• site was based on UVic templates but a lot of bits and pieces have been added, making maintenance difficult
• use templates for new site
• investigate centralizing blocks of information (possibly php) in way compatible with DW/Contribute
• Aim for new version completed by Mar 31, 2007

Having problems getting templates from Robin Sutherland, once I do I'll investigate how they support modularization themselves and with php, and will see how DW/Contribute deals with php.
Also need to go through current content and work out how to reorganize it suitably

Went through Humanities site to find content, structural and presentation features and issues in preparation for meeting with Dean Rippin. Made notes and questions to ask Dean, and am as prepared as I can be with one exception: Still no word from Robin Sutherland on providing the UVic standard templates. I had hoped to look through the templates before meeting with the Dean, but that doesn't look likely now.

After a couple of emails back and forth, met with Robin Sutherland:
- he will send me templates later this week
- he wants me to participate in reviewing new design for templates
- CASS is setting up a "Web Services" office with campus-wide scope, currently has 3 staff. Robin said it would interact with the Faculty support team, and the central communications office and would be doing the redesign.