Weekly update #10

[Total days this week: 3.5 ] - had to swiftly get design elements together for a bus advert for the school.

A change I actually made last week (thanks to a tip in my recent training session) was to use the 'Flexible' layout in Panels, which I've now converted my pages to use. This is good for themeing in CSS as it allows me to set each item on the page to be in a different region, and therefore gives me CSS IDs for each of these regions. One place this has come in handy is the 'Events' section on the Home page. In Panels this is two separate components (the calendar, and the next 5 events, underneath it). Using the flexible Panels layout, I can group these two components into the same region, which then means I can use the CSS ID Drupal creates for this to add a rounded box around the two components as if they are just one component.

- Working on CSS and the Views surrounding News items, to make these look a bit nicer (both the summaries of News items and the page you're taken to with the full item).

- As I've been told that setting up video streaming in Drupal (and in general) is a tricky things to do, and something that some hosting providers don't allow, I've been investigating blip.tv, a free video hosting and streaming service. The wikipedia page about blip.tv provides some useful information including the following points. Generally it sounds pretty good:

• Allows Creative Commons licenses to be set for each video
  
• It's free (you can opt in to advertising, of which you share 50% of the revenue with them, but this whacks an ad on top of your video, which we won't be doing)
• Uploaders retain all copyright of their videos
• It doesn't place a 'blip.tv' logo with on top of your video (like YouTube does when you're viewing an embedded video in a site other than YouTube)
• Allows high quality videos, at high resolutions
• Includes options to automatically post links to videos on Facebook/Twitter/iTunes, etc. if you choose to do so
• You can choose whether to allow comments on your video posts (I've turned these off)
  
• Allows people to download your videos by default (I haven't yet worked out whether this can be disabled)
• It converts everything to Flash video, so video is viewable by pretty much anyone

- Upgraded Drupal core to version 6.13

- The CSS for hiding bullets in an unordered list doesn't seem to work very well (i'm not sure if this is something I was doing wrong, or Drupal being picky). There's a solution for it on the Drupal site, which suggests it was the latter!

- CSS work on getting the Mathematics page to look like the design. Once this is done (which I've used Panels for), I can copy the Panel Page for many of the other pages on the site and remove elements not needed from it.

Weekly update #9

[Days spent on website this week: 3.5]

A shorter week due to a meeting at work and other commitments there.

I wasn't working on the website last week, but this week here's what I got up to this week:

- Correcting a fault with one of the updated modules to get the 'Year' view of the Calendar to display correctly. The fix to it is documented here.

- Editing CSS for parts of the Calendar and Home view to make them fit in with the design of the site more.

- I've changed some of the photos used in the Slideshows where the quality of the image wasn't great.

- 0.5 day training with Ali

- Installed the SWF Tools module, which requires a little more reading of the documentation than other modules when you're setting it up. But once you've done this, it works very well. It means I can easily add swf files to pages, so I've now got the Flash animation slideshows working on the Home and Well-being pages (now I've done this it'll be very easy to add them to the other pages once the images have been confirmed for those pages).

- I'm not sure why, but the Home page started doing funny things at one point, so I had my first go at dropping the data from the database and importing a backup of it to set things back to normal. It was a fairly terrifying experience having not done this before, but it all went smoothly and just highlights the importance of keeping regular backups of the database (and of course any other files your site uses).

- Added a 'Looking Back' section to Home page

- updated the CCK module to the latest version

Here's how the Home page is currently looking. Most of it's there now and, thanks to a training session last week, things like rounded corners in CSS are there now. This is something I'd been struggling with up until that point! I also have the text inline with the images in the News section now, and various other fixes. (The 'Quick Links' section is there twice as I'm experimenting with it):


The Home page

Weekly update #8

[Days spent on website this week: 3]

Another short week - only 3 days this time (due to other work commitments)

- Added sections and menus for all pages shown on the Site Map (most of these have yet to have information added to them).

- I've decided against my previous thoughts on giving the side navigation bar (seen on all but the home page) all links in its menu, and have gone back to following the Web Visuals. This is partly because it will actually work out quicker for me to do!

- Added past issues of our newsletter Spotlight with thumbnails, having added our other newsletter Spotlighter last week. When I get the chance, I'll make this page look nicer.

- I've spent a frustrating half a day trying to link one view to another (the news view on the home page to the larger news view for each item). I haven't yet worked out how to do this which is annoying as it seems like it should be something pretty simple to do!

- After much persuasion from a friend, I've finally got round to installing the Contemplate (Content Template) module. I've been trying to avoid using php, mainly because I've not used it before, but following on from my previous point, it looks like i'll have to! This tutorial is fairly useful, although it looks like there might be something wrong on that page near the bottom (the '.....' bit.

-I'm staring to figure out, using php, how to stop certain thing from appearing in the News articles (what you get when you click on the smaller news items on the Home page). So I don't want it to say what time it was submitted, etc.

-I've done more on the Flash slideshows, and have cropped photos for all primary pages

- Updated 4 modules in Drupal

Weekly update #7

[Days spent on website this week: 4]

This week:

- Working on the breadcrumb trail and its associated CSS

- reading up on template files. Editing these files will be important for positioning some of the page elements (e.g. the breadcrumb trail, which isn't quite in the right place right now)

- edited CSS for Calendar on home page

- I've started work on the Flash slideshows that will appear at the top of each of the main pages. This has so far involved trawling through lots of photos we've recently had taken for the new school prospectus, as well as any high-quality exisiting photos we have, and seeing what would work well at the 'postbox' shape and size set on our web visuals.

- Added a basic-looking page for Spotlighter, and added pdfs of back issues. This will have to do for Sept, but I'll get this looking much more interesting when I get the chance.