Weekly update #3

[Days spent on website this week: 2.5]

A shorter week than normal this week due to the bank holiday and some urgent things at work, so only 2 and a bit days rather than 4 this time.

- Added dimensions to the Web Visuals of some areas on the Home page (required for the css). I've since decided that the Header (wiggly lines + logo) and the photo slideshow that appears just under the primary navigation are taking up far too much vertical space, so I've reduced this. Once web browser navigation is taken into account, and if you're looking at the site on a wide screen (such as that of the laptop I'm creating it with), the actual content of the page previously only began about half way down the screen!

Modified Web Visuals with smaller header and slideshow, some dimensions shown

- Looked at the 'Panels' module for laying out the Home page. I'll be looking into this more soon.

- Added 'Taxonomy' to the News and Dates content types. This is a way of categorising content, so that when, for example, a Date is added to the calendar, I can say what subjects this is relevant to. So if I was adding information on a school play to the calendar, e.g. Romeo and Juliet, I can specify when I'm uploading this Date that it's relevant to both 'Drama' and 'English'. Once I've got time after the initial 'alpha' version of the site in July, I'll hopefully be able to do clever things with this in terms of giving faculty pages their own calendars, which only show events related to the English Dept, for example.

- The default method of input for these Taxonomy terms in Drupal is ok, but it could benefit with being a bit more user-friendly. To get around this problem, I spent some time researching how best to allow input of this kind - this page on the Drupal site was helpful: http://drupal.org/node/212834. I opted to use the 'Content Taxonomy' module to add checkboxes for the available categories for News and Dates content, as this seemed to be the most popular module of its kind, and seemed to have more potential for customisation.

- Scrap that - I tried 'Content Taxonomy' out for a bit, and it didn't seem to integrate well with Drupal's core Taxonomy features. So I'm now using 'Taxonomy Super Select' which seems to do the simple job of providing checkboxes for Taxonomy terms, far better.


Taxonomy in action - notice how News items now have links to the subjects they relate to


When the Humanities link is clicked, the user is taken to a page with all Humanites information in one place (News and Dates)

- One of the problem's I'd intended to fix, seems to have fixed itself! (Not that I'm complaining). For some reason, until I checked yesterday, an error was occurring when a normal user added a Date to the calendar, this would get published immediately, without requiring moderation from an Editor, which shouldn't be the case (News items were working perfectly, however). Dates now go unpublished until an Editor allows them. Phew!

- I've started setting up News items such that an image can be uploaded to go alongside them. I'm currently trying this our with the ImageField and ImageCache modules, but it's quite possible I'll change my mind about these modules once I've seen them in action and start again using different ones!