The last two weeks leading up to the National Youth Gathering were a little insane. I think they’re pretty well wrapping things up so I can look back now and laugh about the whole process. The quick story is that we decided to turn the admission counselors laptops into web servers so they could run a whole website without “the internets”. The problem is, Windows is not the best platform to run a server on. So I had to trouble shoot the process about 35 times. (The last one being over the phone after they were in Florida). But we got it all working!

Students were greeted with a flash movie of about 20 of Drew’s famous pictures of the University throughout all seasons and activities. At any time, students could interrupt the movie to fill out a form requesting more information about the university–including requesting that Comet add them to facebook or myspace. When they submit the form, it resets to the flash movie.

All the info is stored on a flat file on the laptops and we will be able to load them into our system when the counselors get back.

It looks great and is even a little fun. I’m just blown away that the biggest hassle in the whole process was beating Windows into submission!

I finally got everything working to the point I am comfortable launching the new Support Wiki. But, there are a few flakey things here and there that will need to be adjusted to make it truly user friendly. Now, I need to finalize the print css so that it is easy to print pages from the wiki.

I’m getting really close to having the redesign complete. All the parts are loading up correctly, now I just need to put the skin on it–make it look right.

MediaWIki is a great wiki engine. (It is the basis of Wikipedia, if that’s any indication of it’s worth.) But they don’t make it very easy to change the templates. Working with the code for mediawiki is basically like reading a book with the footnotes all printed right inline with the text. (Rather than just looking at a small superscript number which refers somewhere else.) So when you’re trying to figure out why some template code doesn’t work, you can’t just go look through the “footnotes” one at a time until you figure out which one is causing so much pain. Instead, you have to look through the whole “book” trying to figure out which “date” is wrong in any of the “references”. A good template system keeps almost all the code separate from the html, only placing a few small references to the code in the text. Not Mediawiki.

Want to know what the missing code was?
> <?php endif; ?>. Grrrrr.

Technorati Tags:
code, php, mediawiki, templates, dydimustk

I’m working on a design for our Support wiki.

A little history: At one point we used the wiki only for documenting internal process at the Help Desk. Over time it became apparent that our internal documentation would be useful for the whole university. (Why should we hoard the steps for forwarding your email to another account?) The problem is, I have permission to use the design currently on the wiki for internal use only. So, I’m working on making the wiki look more like the rest of CSP.

It’s not playing nice though–I’m combing through the PHP line by line to figure out why it doesn’t want to load the code the way it should. It could be as simple as a single missing ‘>’ or ‘}’. Once it loads up, I’ll just spend a little time adjusting the CSS to make everything pretty.