Beck Trust website transition project
Posted by mholmes on 26 Feb 2009 in Activity log
The Beck Trust website is currently housed on a WebObjects server, but needs ultimately to be moved to its unix.uvic.ca account. I have copies of most of the data (from Trish); it's a mass of DreamWeaver stuff with WebObjects placeholders in it (not quite sure how it works yet, but it's not that complicated). This is the plan:
- Get the becktrus web space back -- currently there's a redirect in place, so if you go to web.uvic.ca/~becktrus/ you get bounced to the WebObjects site.
- Analyse the structure of the current site, listing all the pages. There aren't many, and they're nearly all static, but there's a lot of cruft dating back years in the files, so we might as well start from scratch using only what we know should be there.
- Create a template and a stylesheet for the site, and start building pages. Do all the static pages first, using PHP includes for headers, footers, etc.
- When all the static content is working, look at the events handling. Events are entered into the main UVic events calendar, but they're currently entered anonymously by Trish; they need to go in under a Beck account, so it's easy to read the RSS feed and build the pages.
- The events output needs some sophisticated handling, because it needs to be represented in "Latin" spelling and "Scandinavian" spelling, and also presented in "normal" alphabetical order (by surname exclusively) and in "Scandinavian" order (Scandinavian names sorted by first name, other names by surname). If possible, we present all the items on the same page, and just have headers you can click on to sort them differently (with the sorting done in PHP so that JavaScript isn't a requirement).
- Re-examine all the audio and video content, to see if it needs regularizing or if we can better present it using a modern Flash player rather than the RealAudio that's currently on the site. Some of that audio also seems to be hosted on juno.sfg.uvic.ca. I don't know what that is, or why the audio might be there.
This should take about a month; meanwhile, PAB will continue maintaining the current site insofar as she can; then we'll move over any recent changes at the end of the process. Finally, we redirect the https://beckadmin.uvic.ca/ url to the new location (and I think perhaps also request becktrust.uvic.ca).