Update of Humanities Sites

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.

I believe that I've finished stage one of the philosophy project. Yesterday I was able to implement a php array and the dynamic page that finds the courses taught by each professor. I was also able to add in the arrays that determine whether a course is offered this year or not and add functionality for the graduate and undergraduate pages to grey out courses not offered. I then commented those php pages.

Today I am going to briefly review and compare the two websites to make sure I didn't forget anything. Then I am going to move onto stage two of this project. I am going to create a login page and test how file IO functions to determine if I can use the regular php functions or have to implement the curl library.

I am feeling very sick today so I am taking the day off. I will resume on Monday. Yesterday I cleaned up the side navigation links and added the raquos (">>"). I completed the graduate and undergraduate course pages. I had a bit of difficulty parsing through the the course array to get the the graduate course information because I had to find their starting position and manage with multiple counters.

On Monday I will be completing the professor's courses dynamic php page, finalizing some documentation and then after those two things are completed I believe the website redesign will be completed. After which I will move onto adding the ajax editing capabilities.

I had some difficulty yesterday with converting the JavaScript array to a PHP array. Not that I couldn't create an array but I was falling into some problems with converting the PHP into a literal string so that it could be saved to a file. I had to fragment the PHP array into several lines and then join them together as one string once the process was complete.

From here I was able to read the PHP array on the courses page. I was able it to style it in a similar way to the old website. I was also able to use JavaScript to hide all the course divs after they were printed (so that if a person doesn't have JavaScript enabled it will show all the course data).

Today I am going to attempt to complete the undergraduate course page by letting it only show undergraduate courses and also have the course information expand. Next I will attempt to port this code over to the graduate courses page so that after a bit of tweaking both courses pages will be complete.

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.

I copied the PHP file from the old philosophy website that generated the course information from the UVic Calendar website. I ensured that it still worked and I had the latest copy of the JavaScript course listing array. I duplicated the PHP file so that I could begin changing it by adding newer comments, PHP could find the right calendar year and lastly so it can generate a PHP array.

I originally had the following being generated: '$variable[$counter] = array(element1, element2...)' but i was having trouble accessing the information and towards the end of yesterday I began am trying to change that to another php array format.

Email and phone exchange with Clifton on paths and permissions to port the Agenda database, and on status of philosophy site rewrite. He's trying to implement the javascript array of courses in php.

I've spent some time reviewing how the Philosophy website uses PHP to rip the Philosophy course listings from the UVic Calendar website. It creates a(n) .inc file of a JavaScript array and then includes it in the header for each page and then when the page loads JavaScript interprets the array.

I was thinking that the one downside to this is that if an individual has JavaScript disabled they will not be able to view any course information. Seeing that the new functionality that I plan to implement will not be JavaScript based this could be a perfect opportunity to improve upon how PHP rips the course listings and have a PHP array written to the .inc file. This will allow for PHP interpret the course listing so that even if JavaScript is disabled any one using the website can view the information.

I plan to improve upon how PHP rips the course listing by making it so that the correct calendar year is automatically generated instead of manually entered every year. Also by fixing up the variable names and comments it will allow for easier maintenance. Lastly, perhaps I will be able to use 2 dimensional arrays to separate undergraduate courses from graduate courses.

I will be talking with Stewart more about this idea after the long weekend.

Yesterday I was able to recreate/restyle the static web pages. Functionality was added so that PHP to maintain the display of the last modification date for every file. I moved over the pdf and sophia files to the new development website.

I am going to move onto putting in the static course pages and then begin to look at the dynamic PHP pages and what is involved in bringing those over easily.

I finished with the basic information on the faculty page. (I left the (courses taught) dynamic php link alone for the moment and I will come back to that later.)

I put up the news pages but I noticed that the Human Condition Link from the live site is not working. We will have to either contact the philosophy department or locate the website ourselves to find the new link address.

I was able to recreate/restyle the Programs pages (undergraduate, graduate, applied ethics) yesterday. It was a tedious because I was styling it so that it could be easier to maintain (as there are less html tags).

Today I am going to try to finish the remaining static php pages and begin to organize how the file system will handle the dynamic php pages so that they are separated from the rest of the web site.