Subject Guides: The FINAL Final Confrontation

Finally, with the help of my coworker Cheryl, I figured out the answer to the Subject Guide problems, including the placement of tabbed menu. We created a new region called "content-tabs" and placed it between the header and the main content area in page.tpl.php. Then I put all my tabbed menus there. They now appear between the title and the body in each page, including Views! Why didn't I think of that before??

Of course, as a result I had to redo all my work... again. This is the LAST time I'm going to do this. It seriously took all day to reassign the links, menus, blocks, and remove the pages and views.

However, I hope this will solve the jQuery error I was getting in Firefox (see previous post).

Other accomplishments since I last wrote:

• PPLD Downloads page. Talk about pulling teeth with staff on this one


• Library Cards. Pending staff approval


• Board of Trustees


• Job Help


• Printer-friendly style sheet

Next up:

• Train my intern to work with Drupal. He's very bright, so I don't see any trouble, except for time expenditure


• PPLD Newsroom


• Upgrade Kiosk


• Any changes to Library Card pages


• General formatting of existing pages

Subject Guides: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

I presented the current new website to PPLD's Management Team this past Monday. They were very happy with it, except for one concern. When I was showing the Subject Guides, someone mentioned that having the tabbed menus above the header made it difficult to figure out the tabbed menus were actually for each subject guide. At first I was skeptical, but I checked with a few other staff and they were confused by that as well.

The problem here is that I was using Page Views with arguments for the subject guides and couldn't insert the tabbed menu below the header and above the content (that I know of, anyways). So in order to fix this issue, I had to completely redo the subject guides from scratch.

Phase 1:

1. Made Block Displays for each subject guide category in Databases View


2. Cloned Databases View to make Recommended Websites View


3. Made changes as needed in Recommended Websites View

Phase 2:

1. Created a Page for each category and category type


2. Assigned these pages to their corresponding Blocks


3. Changed pages in corresponding tabbed menu blocks


4. Added pages to Research subnav block and removed old page links


5. Assigned Blocks to proper region and lined them up appropriately


6. Changed links in corresponding tabbed menus


7. Changed links in Subject Guide page

Aside from a few exceptions, this ended up working pretty well. I hope this is the last time I have to do this...

Subject Guides, the Final Showdown

Finally, with help from Growing Venture Solutions (GVS), I figured out how to get my subject guide menus to tab. Here's what I did:

1. Go to any page content type, log in as admin, and use FireBug to track down the style for the edit tabs. In this case, it was the "ul.primary" classes in tabs.css of the Zen theme.


2. Go to a subject guide and using FireBug narrow down the specific class of the menu style. In this case, I decided to use the ".region-content_top .menu" classes, as all my menus were in the Content Top region and no non-tabbed menus are utilized in that region.


3. Copy the "ul.primary" classes from tabs.css and paste into your custom theme's main css file. Substitute ".region-content_top .menu" for "ul.primary" and update other sub-classes as necessary.


4. Copy tab images from Zen/images directory and paste in custom theme's image directory.

This sounds easier than it was to actually accomplish. It definitely took some trial and error on my part to settle everything down, especially with the sub-classes. It's still not perfect, but I pretty happy with the results for the time being.

Now on to the "How Do I?" pull-down menu!

More Subject Guide Mayhem

Lately I've had the vision of using a tabbed menu for PPLD's Subject Guides, much like this example:

http://www.lib.sfu.ca/help/subject-guides/chemistry/home

I spent some time trying to figure out the best way to do this, including using Quick Tabs module, and trying to use a "template" menu (via variables) that I could plug into corresponding Views, but in the end, the best solution was the simplest:

I made a menu for each Subject Guide and populated it with the corresponding resources. Then I attached each menu to its corresponding resource by assigning them as blocks.

Now I need to figure out how to theme the menus so they display as tabs...

Subject Guides

Of course I got a cold after D.C.! So frustrating because I have so much to do. I've come to terms with the fact that I'll be putting in some serious overtime to get this project done in the timeframe that is necessary.

I started the Subject Guides section of "Research" this past week. I plan to take our proprietary databases, recommended websites, related classes and events, and whatever else fits and combine and organize them on one page for easy access, organized by subject. There's a lot of set up involved in this feature, but the outcome will be well worth it.

I've gotten most of our proprietary databases entered, which is step 1 of the process. I'd like to have migrated them, but we've made some major changes that prevent that solution, so hand-entering it is. Hopefully I'll be able to migrate almost everything else.

I plan to come in for a few hours this weekend to finish the job so I can start creating Views by subject.