Weekly update #6

[Days spent on website this week: 3.5]


The Home page - most recent view of it!

Another short week this week, owing to the Bank Holiday, so only 3 days spent on the website (a normal week is 4 days spent on it as I do other bits of work one day a week).

- Added the footer (c) section; I'll add the accessibility 'Change text size' bit to the footer if I get time, but may do after September. I don't think this bit is too important as you can change the text size in most browsers by pressing 'Ctrl' and '+' or 'Ctrl' and '-' (Ctrl becomes Cmd if you're on a Mac). I've also added the section for the footer logos, which need to be revised due to some being out of date.

- Quick Links now looking correct. I need to adjust the spacing between these at some point as they're a bit far apart.

- Lots of CSS on the homepage, along with Panels stuff. Tweaking it to look like the Web Visuals. It's getting close! Although so far it's only the Home page that's close, most of the work I've done up to now has been 'behind the scenes' stuff essential to make the whole site work, as well as learning how to do lots of things. Now that the Home page is nearly there, it'll be a lot easier to implement what I've already done on the other pages of the site.

- I've started work on getting the navigation that appears on the left hand side of all pages, other than the Home page. The web visuals have it looking something like this:


Left side navigation for the Learning page

I decided a while ago for consistency to make this nav bar the same width as the left hand column on the home page (which contains Quick Links, Events, etc.), so it's now slightly wider at 220px. I'm also going to change it slightly from the web visual shown, to also include the other primary links ('Home', 'About Us', etc.). The reason for this is that I'll be able to use the same navigation bar for every page (rather than having just the 'Learning' link at the top when you're in the Learning section) which will make things simpler for me to put it together, and should also make navigating the site easier for the user, so it's a win-win idea! In this case, if you're in the Learning section, the background behind the word 'Learning' as it's shown above will appear white, as is shown for 'Welcome'.

-ARGH! At 3pm on Friday afternoon, I experienced my first ever Drupal WSOD (white screen of death). Although this doesn't initially sound as scary as a Blue Screen of Death, it's actually worse, as at least a blue screen alerts you to the fact that the computer knows something's gone wrong. A white screen just leaves you stranded, unaware as to whether it's your fault, the computer's fault, or both. Or neither.

Fortunately Drupal have a page on their website about dealing with this and it was only the admin/build/modules page I was having this problem, which is mentioned on their page (the error occured when I tried to upgrade 4 modules at the same time). I followed the advice and ran upgrade.php, which gave me a scary looking error message, along the lines of:

Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in .../sites/all/modules/ctools/views_content/views_content.module on line 26

Not what you want when there are only a couple of hours until the weekend and you're feeling smug about the work you have done.

Fortunately, Dr Google came to the rescue when I copied and pasted the 'Fatal error...' message in and someone else had already had this problem and reported it on the Drupal website. All it took in the end was me having to remove one line of code and everything is now fixed.

The problem lay in the fact that some Drupal modules rely on others, which was the case for two of the modules I was upgrading. I think because of the order in which I upgraded them, it got confused.

All I can say is thank Zeus I backed everything up before I upgraded the modules!

- As a result of upgrading the Panels module, some weird borders have appeared around the edge of things:


Home page with strange borders added around things, thanks to Panels

I've removed these using CSS and the Home page now looks as shown at the top of this post.

Drupal does occasionally like to keep one on ones toes!