Almost there, sort of

• I've got most of my modules installed, enabled, and configured.


• I've got a rough archetecture in place, including menus and taxonomy.


• I've got home page, research, and find a good book mock-ups.

In short, I'm just about ready to really start creating content types and entering the content. And I think I'm ready for the usability test dress rehearsal on Tuesday.

Training with Growing Venture Solutions

I attended the Introduction to Drupal 6 training offered by Growing Venture Solutions and learned some useful things:

• Global Redirect and Path Redirect modules help you link to nodes in the body of a node


• Synonyms module indexes synomyms in Taxonomy


• Porter-Stemmer module breaks a search term down to its basic root


• You can create automated URL aliases using Pathauto


• Markdown filter may make a good UI for our staff


• Devel module's Theme developer is a very useful tool for theming


• It's not hard to add a new region within a theme


• Module development, while complicated in practice, is not that complicated in theory


• Don't use PHP Filter, in fact, delete it from the core modules directory


• Watch your input formats and file permissions


• Eclipse, FireBug, and YSlow, are good programs for development and performance monitoring

Most importantly, PPLD has decided to hire Growing Venture Solutions on a consultant basis during the redesign. We're thrilled to get help from Greg and his team!

Meetings!

I swear, it seems all I've doing lately is going to meetings, co-ordinating meetings, taking minutes about meetings, and corresponding with meeting attendees.

I've managed investigate a few modules on the side, but as far as actually website content entry and development, no luck. It's actually getting kind of frustrating.

On the bright side the following is in the works:

1. The Usability Hot Team is conducting a usability test dress rehearsal on Feb 3 to make sure our testing goes smoothly for staff and patrons.


2. Prototypes for the Research/Subject Guides and Find a Good Books sections of the new website have been approved by their corresponding Hot Teams.


3. The Research Hot Team and Find a Good Book Hot Team are going to take on the daunting task of organizing and presenting all corresponding resources for those sections. It'll then be my job to construct a method of populating and displaying said resources on the new website.


4. The Analytics Hot Team is going to test drive WebTrends and investigate Google Analytics.

Whew, quite a lot going on at once, I'll say...

Pathauto and Custom Breadcrumbs

Today I configured Pathauto URL aliases. In automatic alias settings, I was able to define the URL alias by content type. Instructions on how to do this are in the readme.txt of the module, but I also found good instructions (albeit for an older version) here.

I also installed and fiddled with Custom Breadcrumb module. There is some good documentation here. However, I couldn't get the [menu-raw] and [title-raw] to display the correct URL aliases. For example, if I had a Breadcrumb called Home > Find a Good Book > Book Clubs, it was displayed perfectly in the breadcrumb, but when you click on the breadcrumb, instead of going to find-good-book or find-good-book/book-clubs (the correct URL alias), the URL would continue to point to Find a Good Book or Find a Good Book/Book Clubs as the path, which of course returns a 404 error.

I spoofed the correct URL alias, I just suspect that the "raw" indicator isn't functioning properly in Custom Breadcrumbs. So I disabled the module and will check out Taxonomy Breadcrumb instead and/or talk to Greg if necessary.

Finally, I installed and enabled the Synonym module, which kicks butt. All you do is include synonyms in your taxonomy and they are indexed for the Search box. Sweet.

Tomorrow I have other modules to investigate, then I need to start populating the simple pages.

Moving Along

Well, we're chugging right along on the redesign. My assistant Cheryl created a rough mock-up of the new home page that was approved by our Community Relations Officer (with a few minor changes).

I installed the Workflows module on the new website so that all entries will go to a Draft state and then be proofread and published by Community Relations. Although I can't test the email as SMTP is not enabled on the new server yet.

Taxonomies are fairly well honed for this point in time, and I'm sure they will be further tweaked as the content gets entered.

Bill Thomas, our Usability Hot Team leader, has developed a rough draft of our Usability Test Plan that I haven't had a chance to look at yet, but will at some point today.

Creating Multi-sites with cPanel

Last week's homework for Growing Venture Solution's Introduction to Drupal 6 presented me with an opportunity to install my first Drupal multi-site on my test website, vfranklyn.com. I don't normally work in a LAMP environment, so this was a real learning experience for me.

Fortunately, Drupal.org's rockin' community had some excellent documentation:

Multi-site setup in 6.x using cPanel

Of course, I had to wait several hours for the domain name to propagate, but hw.vfranklyn.com is up and running (although quite lame as it is a homework assignment.

Creating Multi-sites with WAMP

This is just for my own future knowledge, as I'm sure multi-sites are inevitable:

Multi-Site on Windows