Milestone 2 Progress

This week is a continuation of our project milestone 2. Our primary objective is to create mockup pages of the initial design that the design team came up with. Below is the design for homepage.















Below is my mockup page of the above design that I created using Drupal CMS.
















I am still unable to implement the slide-show functionality with Drupal. I also noticed that Drupal in general has this boring and uninteresting look (at least for me). In the near future, I would like to work harder on the templates to see if I can make it more eye-catchy and nice.

Overall, I believe that we are progressing quite well, but we may need to speed up a little from now on seeing as how much more work we got to complete for this milestone. It seems that we frequently run into technical issues and we spend too much time attempting to fix that one particular issue. It might be a better idea, though, in the future to ignore some of the issues so that we can get more done in this short time-frame.

Entering Milestone 2

Seemingly long milestone 1 is finally over. Now, we are preparing to enter our next milestone, which will essentially be our development phase 1. We will no longer be creating whatever we want as we did before, but we will now strictly follow Dr. Johnson's new design. This might be a great challenge since not all CMS will be able to do exactly what the project requires. We will certainly be dealing with plenty of work-arounds.

After some considerations, we have decided to keep all four CMS for our development milestone 2. This is taking into account that not all of our CMS could do what it needed to do for the previous milestone. This will mean that we would have to work extra hard for our next milestone to get those CMS to finish up the requirements for milestone 1 and continue with milestone 2. I believe this is do-able.
Fortunately though, the new design that Dr. Johnson had come up with does not look awfully different from what we have been doing. Our site already implements CAS login and is capable of distinguishing admin users from the participant users. What I will have to work on Drupal now is to make it so that once a user logins to the page, he will be directed back to the same page but with more functionalities. My current implementation is that the user will be redirected to a different page once he logs on. I did this so that I could avoid the "Permission Denied" message that Drupal spits out whenever a user is not authorize to view a certain section of a page. I would have to work around this problem though, in order to achieve our goal for milestone 2. This may not be an easy task.

Another requirement for milestone 2 is that we have to create a config file that stores all the information about user authentication. This took me by surprise as I have no idea how to implement this. I will have to research quite a bit to get this to work I assume.

Completing milestone 2 should not be a terribly difficult task, but it certainly will be a step-up from our previous milestone.

Finishing up Milstone 1

We are about to complete the first stage of our project. As I have mentioned before, our goal for this initial stage was to determine which CMS is best suited for the Dorm Energy Competition system, also known as the Kukui Cup Competition.

After some considerations, I have decided to test out Drupal, not only because I was quite unfamiliar with the system, but also because I simply wanted to try something that was new to me. Getting Drupal to work was not easy. I certainly do understand why so many on the Internet complain about this CMS's high learning curve. It does take a lot of patience and effort to really get the hang of this system. Drupal at a glance, does seem a bit underpowered compared to that of the competitors such as Joomla. I was surprised to learn that the initial installation of Drupal does not include modules such as "View" or "Page". These modules are used so frequently that I believe they should be included in Drupal's initial installation. Just the fact that some of the modules, are missing from the initial settings does make this CMS seem a bit more difficult to understand at first.

For the first milestone of this project, I created a basic mock up page to demonstrate the ability of Drupal so that we can then determine which CMS deserves the spot.

The prelogin page was fairly easy to create once I got the hang of using modules such as "page" and "view". The page is basically separated into two sections using the page module, and I inserted the content into each of the two sections with the help of the "view" module. Both the contents, the youtube video and the calendar are simply inserted into the content in html format.

The Kukui Cup page was a different story. For a strange reason, I was not able to simply embed the Google Gadget code into the content of the webpage. Doing so would result in HTML 502 Error. I was not able to resolve this issue unfortunately. I was; however, able to get around this problem by instead embedding the Google Gadget code into the block itself (without using the content module). This caused this particular page to be less flexible and more difficult to work with.

Although Drupal may be difficult to work with at times, its function as CMS is still superb. I would say that we still have quite a ways before deciding on our CMS of choice.

Testing Drupal

Our task last week was to come up with at least 4 CMS that we might be able to use for our Kukui Cop Dorm Energy Competition. We have managed to come up with the following four CMS: Joomla, Drupal, DotCMS, and SilverStripe. After some considerations, I have decided to work on creating a mock up page of Drupal.

Using Drupal I would have to say was very difficult. The user interface of the system was very unintuitive, at least for me, at first and it took me couple of days to figure out how everything works. I would have say though, once I got used to the system, it is actually pretty useful and powerful CMS.

I first started by creating a very simple mock up page of the Kukui cup system with HTML tables and lists. This was easy enough as all I needed to do was to hard code everything into the body of the page. My next task was to figure out whether we can actually use this CMS to do what we need to do for our actual project. It was very simple to figure out how to get the Google Gadgets to work with Drupal. The main problem I had with Drupal was that it took me a very long time to figure out how to insert multiple modules into a single page, i.e. frontpage. It turns out that I needed to use a separate module called pannel to achieve this. After figuring the above out, rest seemed quite straightforward.

I am starting to get used to using Drupal; however, the sheer amount of problems I ran into while trying to get this CMS to work still makes me look back at Joomla. This week's task is to determine our CMS of choice. This maybe a difficult task.