Wednesday, December 31, 2008

New Year's Resolution...

It's difficult to take the time to document my progress on the redesign. My only New Year's resolution is to enter my progress EACH DAY that I work on this project.

So far I have done the following:

  • Set up preliminary permissions

  • Installed and enabled some basic modules

  • Created taxonomy for About the Library, Library Branches, Special Collections, and Find a Good Book

  • Created pages for several sections and assigned them to corresponding menus and tagged with corresponding taxonomy. The only sections left are Events and Research.



I also need to roughly flesh out what will be on the home page, add notes to the pages for their future population, and double-check everything.

The most confusing thing right now is how to handle taxonomy. I'm assigning almost everything to at least one term, but I'm not sure how it's going to pan out. I need to figure out how to hide the terms listed at the bottom of each page.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Onward Ho!

Now that EZProxy is successfully completed, it's time for the next phase of the redesign: Redesigning!

Creation of Website prototype, using Site Map as menu structure:

  1. Create preliminary permissions (2 admin, 1 staff)

  2. Download and install necessary modules

  3. Create Taxonomy for each section of ppld.org

  4. Create Main Menu (primary links)

  5. Create sub-menus (secondary links, or menus from taxonomy?)

  6. Populate pages with title only and assign to taxonomy


Terribly exciting and only a little behind schedule...

EZProxy

This morning I officially migrated ppld.org to EZProxy authentication. I originally thought this task would take one week. It ended up taking about three weeks. It was much more tedious, complicated, and time consuming than I originally thought.

Here's what I learned:


  1. Contacting database vendors is a time-sucker

  2. PPLD subscribes to a lot of database, each of which had to be altered in a separate script. Tedious and time-consuming

  3. We've linked to specific databases via Catalog authentication throughout ppld.org. Locating each instance and changing the scripts are not only tedious and time-consuming, but complicated.

  4. EZProxy rocks.



I'm pretty sure I fixed all issues involving the migration. However, only time and patron complaints will tell for sure.

All databases need to authenticate via EZProxy for the redesigned website. Hence the migration.