CoolStateLA/April 5, 2008
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Tasks for the week ending April 5, 2008. Each task has a status area for you to describe what has been accomplished this week.
[edit] Conceptual mock up screens: Muhammad Lodhi (and Ren as available)
Conceptual mock-up screens are like the screens uploaded and discussed today. They identify the information that will be presented on the screen. The format is not important.
By April 5 we should have revised conceptual mock-up screens for the News Budget and Story Detail screens. The News Budget screen really provides access to all stories, like the STORI database. The News Budget is one view of that list of Stories.
Once generated the screens should be uploaded to the server so that we can access them remotely as we did today. (If you don't remember how, talk to MK.)
Let's not develop screens for each medium for now. Let's just work on these two primary screens. (But the story detail screen should include the matrix of editor and producer for each medium that we discussed.)
Besides the information discussed today, the story detail screen should include a list of the assets associated with that story. These assets should be anything one wants to store, including reporter's notes, images, videos, text formatted for web pages, text formatted for the newspaper, a radio script, etc. The actual content of these assets are stored in Fedora. The screen will allow one to add assets and to see what assets have been accumulated for a story.
We may want to create a separate story-asset screen to be used if a story has too many assets.
[edit] Conceptual mock up screens: status
[edit] Look & feel mock up screens: Sepideh Nazari
The look and feel screens should be relatively polished and should give us an idea what the screens will actually look like when the system is finished. They should approximate the information on the conceptual mock-up screens, but if they don't match exactly, it's ok for now. Eventually, of course, they will have to match exactly. It is the Look and Feel screens that will become the actual system. So they should contain the contents we decide on.
These screens (presumably JSP files) should have embedded Java calls to objects that when written will generate data by accessing the database. But since these are just look and feel screens, stub versions of the called methods should be written. These stubs should execute and return artificial data for the sake of illustrating how the screens will look.
These screens should be uploaded to the server. We should be able to access them remotely as we did with today's html screens. That means they should be stored where JSP can be executed.
MK should ensure that this is possible. MK and Sepideh should coordinate on this.
Sepideh, if you are interested in some additional sophistication, you may want to look into Ajax. It would be nice if we could add some Ajax capabilities to some of these screens. This isn't required, but if you can learn how to do that, it would be great. I strongly recommend that if you have additional time you spend it on AJAX rather than on your original workflow system.
[edit] Look & feel mock up screens: status
[edit] Database schema: Ishani Vyas
Develop a database schema that can handle the model implied by the two screens. Ishany should consult with Muhammad (and Ren as available) about this.
Load the schema into the MySQL database on the server so that it can be accessed with phpMyAdmin.
MK should install (or ask Fernando to install) phpMyAdmin.
[edit] Database schema: status
[edit] Joomla! plug-in: Deidre Foster-Smith with help from Dhaval Joshi
Consult with Dhaval Joshi to get the Joomla! templates that are used on the CoolState website.
Upload those templates to the server's installation of Joomma! so that our version of the CoolStateLA website can be accessed remotely. This means that Joomla! should be installed and running on the server. Consult with MK to ensure this is done. Our first priority for the week is to have our version of the CoolStateLA.om website working on our server.
Understand enough about Joomla! to write a simple plug-in to our version of the CoolStateLA website and demonstrate how it works.
Once this is done, think about how we want the use to specify where in the templates stories are to be put. That is, a template is a framework for laying out a page. The actual contents varies from day to day or week to week. We would like some simple way for the user to specify which stories are used in which slots. This should be something that the user should be able to do without having to learn Joomla! In other words we want to create a simple front-end to help users insert content into templates. What should that look like?
[edit] Joomla! plug-in: status
I got a template fromDhaval but I when I ran it on my computer I realised that it calls and depends on modules that I don't have installed. So for this week I concentrated on writing a simple module. Since the project entails calls a MySQL database I decided I would get my feet wet by writing a simple one that accesses a table I created and displays it's contents. I had some configuration issues which put be back a step but I got it working and I should be able to recreate it on the Deployment server.
To see my progress the you can see it here and it here and click on Joomla Colors.
[edit] Fedora: Kaleem Rana
No specific Fedora tasks. Kaleem, if you are finished with understanding Fedora, you might get Mark's feeder code installed and running. That means install it on the server so that it executes from there and so that we can access it remotely. Talk to MK about how to do that.
[edit] status
- I worked on the News Budget page and achieve the goal which we wanted by AJAX coding. Now we can update the priority of the news by drop & drag instead of using multiple combos to change the priority. I will give the demo for the page today, you will see, its more professional and according to Jon requirements.
- I am also done with the Feed Filter code and its running on my machine. As far as uploading to the server is concerned, theres is no directory structure which will help me in uploading the project. Server needs to be setup properly for uploading the web projects. Also, there is no database created in the server, which I was expecting. So, hopefully, I will try to setup the feed filter into the server in the coming two weeks.
[edit] Lucene: Dhaval Joshi
Dhaval, you should make your primary priority for this week to help Deidre and MK get a copy of the CoolStateLA website running on our server. Lucene should be your second priority. If you, Deidre, and MK get our version of the CoolStateLA website up and running on our server, work on preparing a demonstration of Lucene.
[edit] Lucene: status
[edit] Development Environment: MK
MK, I've listed a number of things for you above. If you have time after helping everyone else, see if you can get Subversion running.
[edit] Development Environment: status
- Conceptual mock-up screens: Server is set up. CoolstateLA team members can upload files, documents etc. to the server and be able to organize them through web interface. Made a link to one of the upload directory on the server, called mock-up, so that the contents of this directory including sub-directories can be accessed anywhere through web interface.
- Installed and configured Jommla! on the server. NOTE: FTP layer is not enabled and we should not enable it because SERVER does not support FTP. Server only supports Secure FTP(sFTP) instead.
- Phpmyadmin software that manages mysql database on the server, is installed.
- Subversion server is up and running. Requires tunneling to connect to Subversion server from off-campus. I will provide instructions to use subversion.
- Username and password for the subversion accounts will be emailed individually.
- Currently Working on:
Subversion- Mark's Feeder Code Installation on the server. NOTE: Feeder code requires to re-arrange the package tree and modify the database information based on new(?) unified database schema. I may have to ask Mark for this to make changes. (LOW priority for now)
TO BE DISCUSSED...
- Configuration file for coolStateLA applications: I think we should have our own common configuration file in a designated place so that instead of hard coding database username/password etc. into application, application will load from the configuration file at the time of initialization. This mechanism may come handy at times when we need to make quick changes in certain parameters without having to modify and recompile JAVA source codes.
- mock-up screen should include the user login screen for staff members.
