Depts

JCloze files for 100A tests from December last year came in from RLS's student. Had to process them in a Windows VM because my Wine setup seems to be borked (it's a dev version). Had to rename files, move instructions from title field to instructions field, and fix a couple of typos, but other than that, no major issues (although I haven't actually tested the files myself).

LB has tasked a student with adding abbreviations for each title to the db, which requires a new "abbreviation" field. I've added the field and updated local_classes.php, and I've also tweaked the RSS code (rss_all.php and rss_latest.php) to include the field if it has any content.

HeleneC enquired about creating a site based on an important medieval anatomy book and its repercussions. Looked into a bit a gave her the following questions to think about and then discuss:

What do you hope to achieve with this website?

What value can you add to existing source material? How does that differ from what others have done?

Who are the intended audiences (students, researchers, practitioners), and in what domains (french, art, anatomy, history, history of medicine)?

Is the emphasis on the publication De Fabrica or on the material documenting the reception and repurcussions of that publication?
If the former, are there interesting ways of categorizing the images of other elements of the document (by technical treatment, by body part, by text feature in original annotation or subsequent commentary). Your site might be based on an online edition of De Fabrica (with annotations on the drawings and the text, search etc.)
If the latter, are there interesting ways of categorizing those "reception and repurcussion" documents (e.g. by time, by geographical location, by their relationship to to other such documents, by attributes of the author or publisher (gender, religion, academic discipline, language).

Do you have a central organizational theme? Is there a metaphor for that theme which might be useful in presenting the theme? Might there be a graphical way of representing the theme or organizing the material (e.g. timeline, map, annotated image).

Are there sites (or books) that demonstrate any of the features you'd like to include in your site?

On DR's instructions, made a set of changes to pages on the Hispanital site (updates to calendars and courses, faculty info, film series, colloquium etc.). Validated all the changed pages, and fixed a couple of validation errors in links pages which must have been there for years.

Did this from home because my work machine is still rebuilding itself.

China Foreign Relations site reports problem with rewrite rules in the htaccess file in the root of their drupal instance. I checked and cofirmed that the mod_rewrite engine was on and working (created a little test folder with two files and a rewrite rule that said if you get the URL of the first file, return the contents of the second file).
Then tried to figure out why the problems with the rewrites reported by the user were happening.
works: http://chinaforeignrelations.net/index.php?q=user
didn't work: http://chinaforeignrelations.net/user
the rewrite rules should have turned the first into the second. I figured out that the RewriteBase instruction was wrong, so corrected that and then both forms of the URL worked.

User then reported that URLs of the form
http://chinaforeignrelations.net/user<http://chinaforeignrelations.net/index.php?q=user>;
I have no idea where URLs of that form are coming from, but they look very dodgy to me. Most likely autogenerated from some other DRUPAL code, so I'm not dealing with that. Did hypothesize that the L switch on the RewriteRule might be invoking the rule a second time, but am not going to spend more time researching it.

I added a new, blank page to the French site. Here's the details of what's needed:
1) copy web-pages/graduate_courses.php and rename it field_school.php
2) edit field_school.php:
change
$this_webpage_file_name = "graduate_courses.php";
$this_webpage_title = "Graduate Courses";
to
$this_webpage_file_name = "field_school.php";
$this_webpage_title = "Field School";
modify content inside English div and French div
3) update web-pages/script_files/php/menu.php:
make copy of this:
<li><a href="<?php print($add_level2."".$add_level3."".$directory_to_go); ?>graduate_courses.php">Graduate</a></li>
and change the copy to this:
<li><a href="<?php print($add_level2."".$add_level3."".$directory_to_go); ?>field_school.php">Field School</a></li>

This fall, we'll likely be redoing the French site in the new web-based authoring system, so there probably won't be many more modifications of structure in the existing site.

the web interface for adding an event on the uvic events calendar site does not require any authentication, but submits the proposed event as coming from "guest" to the administrator(s) of the calendar selected in the first dropdown in the form. The administrator must then approve the request before it appears in the public interface.
There is an admin interface (at a URL easily derived from the root of the events site), which does require you to authenticate with your netlink and then knows which calendars you are entitled to post to and approve requests from guest for.
I'd forgotten that there is no element in the GUI of the public events calendar site that takes you to the admin part of the site - DaveW reminded me.

Also discovered that if I include html tags in the description in the public authoring interface, those seem to be stripped before the data is saved to the database. If I include html tags in the description in the admin authoring interface (e.g. and img tag), those seem to be retained in the db, but are stripped out by the rendering code. Either way, manually adding html tags to an event posting doesn't appear viable.