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Archive for December, 2007

Testing Our Services

December 20th, 2007 by Ian McBride

One of the updates that will (hopefully) happen over the holiday break is a hardware and software upgrade to the primary web service. This should increase system performance and also applies some updates to the central system we use for managing all of the content of the website (Microsoft Content Management Server). To perform this upgrade, we needed to ensure that all of the services currently in use on the primary web server would remain working once we switched over to the new machine. I just completed that testing, begun several weeks ago, this afternoon with the production of a script we can follow in the future for testing other upgrades. Just to give a sense of the scope of the services that are going to potentially be affected, here’s a list of all the stuff we tested in preparing for this update.

1	Custom PHP Applications

1.1		Campus Map

1.2		Change Log

1.3		Dining Menu

1.4		Middlebury Directory

1.5		Monterey Directory

1.6		Forms (Non-TouchNet)

1.7		GO

1.8		MAuthRA

1.9		Economics REPEC Repository

1.10		Ride Board

1.11		Schools Abroad PreDeparture

1.12		TouchNet Forms

1.13		Monterey Store

2	Custom ASP Applications

2.1		Banner Web Scout

2.2		List Subscribe / Unsubscribe

2.3		List Segmentation

3	Microsoft Content Management Server

3.1		Rendering Scripts

3.1.1			FAQ

3.1.2			Front

3.1.3			Gateway

3.1.4			List

3.1.5			ListNewsPostings

3.1.6			ShowNewsPostings

3.1.7			Academics

3.1.7.1				ListExperts

3.1.7.2				ListProfiles

3.1.7.3				PrintProfiles

3.1.7.4				ShowProfilesPermissions

3.1.8			Admin

3.1.8.1				GetByTool

3.1.8.2				SearchTool

3.1.9			Athletics

3.1.9.1				EventsManagement

3.1.9.2				GeneralManagement

3.1.9.3				GetRoster

3.1.9.4				ListCaptains

3.1.9.5				ListProfiles

3.1.9.6				TeamScoreboard

3.1.10			HR

3.1.10.1			ListJobDescriptions

3.1.11			SEO

3.1.11.1			Babysitters

3.1.11.2			JobPostings

3.1.11.3			OffCampusJobPostings

3.1.12			Tools

3.1.12.1			GetFeed

3.1.12.2			GetFooter

3.1.12.3			GetHeader

3.1.12.4			GetImage

3.1.12.5			GetLeftCol

3.1.12.6			GetRightCol

3.2		Templates

3.2.1			Contacts

3.2.2			FAQ

3.2.3			Gallery

3.2.4			Main

3.2.5			MME

3.2.6			News

3.2.7			Redirect

3.2.8			RedirectBlurb

3.2.9			Academics

3.2.9.1				Expert

3.2.9.2				Profile

3.2.9.3				Student

3.2.10			Athletics

3.2.10.1			AsstCoaches

3.2.10.2			Profile

3.2.10.3			Roster

3.2.11			Errors

3.2.11.1			Error

3.2.11.2			SSLRedirect

3.2.12			HR

3.2.12.1			JobDescription

3.2.13			SEO

3.2.13.1			Babysitter

3.2.13.2			Base

3.2.13.3			GreenCard

3.2.13.4			JobDescription

3.2.13.5			JobPosting

3.2.13.6			StudentApp

3.3		The Edit Console

3.3.1			Live and Edit Modes

3.3.2			Production Manager

3.3.3			Approval Assistant

3.3.4			Resource Manager

3.3.5			Create a New Page

3.3.6			Connected Postings

3.3.7			Opening the Edit Window

3.3.8			Saving Pages

3.3.9			Deleting Pages

3.3.10			Moving Pages

3.3.11			Copying Pages

3.3.12			Page Properties

3.3.13			Revision History

3.3.14			View Revisions By Date

3.3.15			Create Channel

3.3.16			Delete Channel

3.3.17			Sorting Items in a Channel

3.4		The r.a.d. Editor

3.4.1			Basic Functions

3.4.1.1				Copy

3.4.1.2				Paste

3.4.1.3				Find & Replace

3.4.1.4				Print

3.4.1.5				Spell Check

3.4.2			Custom Links

3.4.3			Formatting

3.4.3.1				Alignment

3.4.3.2				New Paragraph

3.4.3.3				Text Formatting

3.4.4			Listing

3.4.4.1				Horizontal Rule

3.4.4.2				Indenting

3.4.4.3				Ordered List

3.4.4.4				Unordered List

3.4.5			Non-Text Functions

3.4.5.1				Docuement Manager

3.4.5.2				Image Manager

3.4.5.3				Tables

3.4.6			Other Text Functions

3.4.6.1				Format Stripper

3.4.6.2				Hyperlinking

3.4.6.3				Insert Symbol

3.4.7			Styles

3.4.7.1				Apply CSS Class

3.4.7.2				Headings

3.4.8			Undo & Redo

2D Design in the CMS

December 18th, 2007 by Ian McBride

New 2D design for interactive search

One of the things you’ll doubtless notice about the current design of Middlebury College’s website is that it’s always the same width, about 780 pixels. This design decision was made in 2002-2003 when many people were browsing the web with monitors configured to 800 x 600 pixel resolutions. While it gives our site a very professional and contained look-and-feel, it does make several tasks difficult.

The biggest of these issue is what to do about tabular data. In the screenshot above you can see a search interface for a small database of undergraduate research opportunities. The results of this form will be displayed in a table with sortable columns. Around 15 sortable columns. That just won’t fit in the roughly 450 pixels we have to work with in the official site design.

So we have a secondary design (pictured above), which has the approved logo, the title of the page and a blue bar, which is the approved shade of blue, or as close we can get to it and still have it look the same across all browsers. Below the dotted line we’ve been given semi-free reign over what can be done in the design. Chief among our restrictions is that it shouldn’t look much like the official site design.

This CMS “rendering script” uses the same header, left navigation, and right navigation controls as the rest of the CMS, meaning that we can modularly update the way those scripts work and have it work across both site designs (as well as another new site design that’s coming up). It took a little bit of mucking with our current scripts for me to pull this off because they were designed with only having a single site to support. For instance, the header pulled in two CSS files that I didn’t want showing up on the new design. We now have a special ASP.NET User Control called “Head”, which has a placeholder for adding new CSS files and some code for handling RSS feed, meta tags, and search robots. There are then two other user controls called “HeadTags” which both inherit “Head” and override a method that lets them add in custom CSS files, depending on what part of the CMS we’re in. Athletics, Language Schools, Breadloaf, etc. all have the same basic CSS files, but each add a couple extra to complement the site design.

Similarly, I created instances of the left and right navigation columns that only include the links to content, leaving out the extra images that frame the columns on the official design and some of the extra functionality included in those columns, like the links to Gateways. These will again be useful when we implement a new site design for another area of the College that isn’t going to have these elements. Or, at least, it won’t have them in quite the same way.

I’ll have more on this search page: what it is for, what it does, and a little on how it works in my next post which will be after I get the search functionality working.

New Blog?

December 16th, 2007 by Ian McBride

I’ve decided to set this up as my new blog, removing content from the old blog which was hosted on our local development copy of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Nothing against that software, but it’s easiest for me to maintain this content offsite, since I don’t have to log in through the VPN to do my editing. Also, with upgrades and other software moves, I didn’t want to keep re-creating my blog when we moved the development server around.

I’ve imported some of the more public-friendly posts from the old blog, which were mostly updates on our development progress with various systems. There was some other old content having to do with visits to conferences, but the content skirted the line on what I’d like to have on a public site, which is where I’d like to focus the efforts of this blog from now on.