Nearing the End of Milestone 2

We are now about to hit the second wall of the semester. Having worked with Drupal for the past couple months, I would have to say that all the hardship and frustration was definitely worth it. I now am very confident at building a website using a CMS and I hope that I sometime in the near future, I would be able to use
what I learned out in the job field.
















The above page is my homepage. I have changed the Login link from having two separate users (user and admin) to a single link, Login. I would also like to mention that the CAS login is now fully functional, meaning that it can now logout properly without caching the previous users' information.

















Above image is an example of an admin user signing into the system. The user is now presented with options modify the content. The user can also navigate to the back-end administration page by clicking on the "Admin" tab at the right hand corner of the menu bar.

















Above is my Google Project hosting website titled Kukui-cup-drupal. Its frontpage now has an example image of the system. I have also added two wiki pages: a developer's guide and a installation guide. In the downloads section, I have added the backup of the database created by a Drupal module "backup and migrate". This module is capable of generating backup copies of the developing site in case we decide to roll back due to an issue. We can also use this backup file to create a brand new copy of the system, which is another reason why the file is available for download.

Building the Dorm Energy Compettion

This week is a continuation of milestone 2. My web-page built on Drupal is certainly improving now that I have added additional functions and pages. Last week I had a lot of trouble getting the slide-show and the tabs-within-tabs modules to work. I am happy to say that both of the modules are now in working order.

Below are some of the pages that I created/improved on.

















One noticeable improvement that I made into this page is the slide-show function. The module is currently set to rotate between 4 images of the UH dormitories. An admin user can easily modify the images by uploading the desired image onto Drupal through the use of Image module.

Another noticeable addition is the CAS login links at the lower right corner of the header section. Both of the links, User and Admin, links to the UH CAS login page where the user can login using their UH username and password.

















Above is the resource page. I modified the sub-menus to appear just below the main-menu so instead of letting it sit on the left-side of the page which clutters it up unnecessarily.

















This is the Energy Hub sub-section of the Resource tab. This page was a quite a challenge with Drupal. It contains two tabs-within-tabs modules which allows the user to switch between multiple nodes without reloading the entire page.
















Above is the Kukui Cup page which simply explains what the competition is about, why should you compete, how to compete, etc.















This billboard page merely describes how you can win the competition, what the rewards are, etc.
















This help page provides the users with a general information about the competition.




















It is important to note that CAS login once again is in working order. Above page is where the user will be directed after clicking on one of the login links on any of the pages.


















After logging in, the user will be redirected back to the homepage, which now contains some additional features such as MyEnergy tab. Moreover, the two login links at the header is now replaced with a logout link.

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.

Trying out some CMS

Our team, Kukui Cup Tech is currently on its second stage of the production. We have looked at numerous CMS out there to determine which is well suited for our project. We so far came up with four different CMS: Joomla, Drupal, DotCMS, and SilverStripe.

After presenting our findings with Dr. Johnson, we determined that we should go ahead and create a mock-up page for each of the CMS that we chose. Thus far, we successfully created a mock-up page for Joomla and DotCMS. I would not say that any of the two systems were simple to work with.

Joomla was quite straighforward except that we had to design a template for it work correctly. The initial template design was quite confusing as we had to implement some php code with the html. Working with some of the administrative tools such as article, category, and section managers were quite confusing at first. Luckily, though, we got used to them fairly quickly.

Joomla seems fairly easy to work with and so far we can conclude that it provides all the functionalities necessary for the project. It does provide multiple social networking modules as well as a module for hosting a forum. My thoughts remain the same as those of my previous post's. I am still inclined towards the use of Joomla for the project.

We are still looking to research some other possibilities, including Drupal and SilverStripe. I hope to find the best suited CMS for this project soon.