Style stolen from Patrick

Brushed up on my XHTML and did a very basic page layout that included basic XHTML elements such as ordered and unordered lists, headers, and div for dividing the various parts of the page. I then added a basic CSS layout on top of the page which did just a basic arranging of the page elements into navigation, content, and footers, which can be seen here.

I'm hoping that this coming week I can continue to work on CSS and hopefully learn some tricks from the OSWD site.

This week I continued my work on CSS, moving past the simple layout elements and into stylizing the site. I began looking at some of the OSWD sites, mainly at the Grapes layout, which I adapted a lot of ideas from.

For next week I would like to continue working with CSS, as I feel like I need to do much more work if I'm going to accomplish my goal of having a fairly thorough understanding of CSS by Spring Break. For this next week in particular, I feel like I should concentrate on reading through the sections on CSS in the Web Design book and attempting to get a stronger sense of the fundamentals of CSS.

Goals for Week 3:

So! I didn't update this in time for class, but I worked out a really basic HTML page for the IMSG homepage. I tried to work this page into a CSS layout, but without positioning things absolutely I pretty much failed at everything. So I got a quick example of how to actually layout a site from Jim, and now I'm going to experiment a bit with adopting layouts from others rather than making something from scratch.

I listed all my goals below at the beginning of last week, and next to them I've done a little progress report on each. I succeeded, at least mostly, in all the goals I set, which makes me pretty happy. I wrote up the entire site sans CSS to get something working and functional up on the official site, and got all of the content up there and published by Sunday. This morning I searched out a suitable CSS style from OSWD and then applied it to the site, modifying it in a couple of little ways. All in all I think I did what I set out to do.

As for next week, I'm planning on tidying up the CSS, applying it to the entire site and publishing it. We'll see where we'll go from there.

Goals for Week 5:

Midterm: So I finished the IMSG website, as you can see here. I took the basic layout I had prepared last time and applied it to the entire site, tweaked a couple things with color and placement and now have a complete web-page. I think I ended up doing exactly what I was hoping to do, as I both finished the site and also feel confident enough to make sites with full CSS, though definitely from a layout and not from scratch. Overall I feel like I learned as much CSS and HTML as I had hoped, and I feel ready to try and take on Drupal.

This week I attempted an install of Drupal in my rdolan directory of cs:8080. I first had difficulty figuring out how to access this site, but Patrick helped me find my way and also gave me a username on PHPMyAdmin and a database named rdolan. After a little bit of tinkering with PHPMyAdmin, and with a lot of help from Patrick, I've got an up and running install of Drupal 5.1 on my cs:8080 account. I think this is a pretty good jumping-off point for our Drupal projects, and tomorrow I'm hoping we can discuss where we want to and where we can go with this project in six weeks.

This week I also did an extended brainstorming session about what sort of features I´m hoping to work on for this course, and I would like to modify Nook to add Town meeting content. The central piece of this would be to give each committee and Town Meeting position access to their own pages and content on Nook, which they could make public or viewable only to other committee members. I would then like to make some sort of automated system for managing the membership for the committees, so to give each member a term on the committee and when positions open up to throw them automatically into a nomination and election system for electing new members. So all this sounds wonderful, and me and Patrick will be experimenting with all this for next week. Cheers.

Again you can find the website that me and Patrick have decided to use as our collective sandbox here, and you can log in with admin priveleges with ´jim´ as both your username and password, sans quotes.

This week me and Patrick got together and attempted to put up a basic system for managing content for committees as well try and work on the committee nomination system. We first tried creating content with terms and using a module that allowed certain groups of users to view different content based on those terms. We then moved on to using the organic groups module, which has all the features we could need including content viewable only to group members as seen here. We then tried to work on a nomination system but found creating one much more difficult than we thought, although eventually we worked out a basic nomination system which allows you to create a ¨nomination¨ content type and submit a name and choose the committee you are nominating them for, as seen here.

There is one great problem we´ve been running into and that´s the issue of memory use between Drupal and Apache2. Randomly we´ll run into error pages saying something along the lines of the following:

That´s the error I got when trying to enter the administrator page all day Saturday, so I hope this error remains until Tuesday so you can take a look at it with us. So, so far we´ve created a basic system of managing committee content and nominations, although both will have to greatly worked on before their in any shape to be attempted on a copy of Nook.

This week I talked to Elliot and he managed to give me a sandbox copy of Nook on his deluge server. We talked for a while about the possibilites of using roles and permissions, but we decided that groups would be a far more long-term solution and might also help them with other Nook admin problems, such as having to create roles for each entering class to assign privileges.

I also worked with Elliot and got ftp write access so I could install modules, but sadly after several attempts I was unable to install any, so I'm going to talk to Patrick and hopefully we'ĺl fix this so we can play with Organic Groups on Nook.

Since I was unable to work with groups on Nook, I went back and played with them on my cs:8080 site and started anew with a Town Meeting group. I've also decided more on the layout of the site, with Town Meeting being the main group under which all the committees would sub-groups. Also, I created a new content type called Town Meeting Date, which would be used to post each date for Town Meeting field and each would have an agenda field and a minutes field, and could be commented on by all members of the Town Meeting group, aka all community members. This will be central content in the Town Meeting group, and soon I'll work on committees as sub-groups of Town Meeting.

The main thing I would like to do is edit the Organic Groups navigation blocks used on the group pages, but it seems like to do so I'd need some knowledge of PHP, so I'll talk to Patrick and see what we can do. I also need to work on permissions, how to define what users can create what content. I'd like to figure out a way to do it for each committee, which would mean avoiding individual roles of administration for each group. Then I'd like to create views to see a full Town Meeting schedule of upcoming and past Town Meetings. But most of all I'd like to get this functioning on the Nook sandbox, so we can see how this all works with the roles and taxonomy permissions in Nook.

http://cs.marlboro.edu/ courses/ spring2007/tutorials/ web_design/ ryan_log
last modified Monday April 16 2007 10:17 pm EDT