Tech and Open Source

I've been pushing to get the new campus interactive map out while we've got families visiting campus. In order to pull a lot of different authoritative data sources together with a variety of developers and development practices, I've come to rely on Drush, git and svn.

Some of the final touches are reviewing the work done for campus maps (http://maps-dev.ucsc.edu) and trying to get as much into code as we can. One way of doing this is by using the Context module. This will allow us to create conditions and reactions for different sections of the site. We can then export this information from the database to the filesystem where it can be managed in git or svn.

Had an odd problem working with new D7 sites on my Mac laptop. Turns out I needed to edit the settings.php file to use 127.0.0.1 instead of its default entry for localhost.

Referenced from: http://drupal.org/node/726970

Here's an example:

peterm-macbook:sites peterm$ drush dl views

SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] No such file or directory [warning] Project views (7.x-3.0-alpha1) downloaded to [success] /library/webserver/documents/drupal-7.0/sites/all/modules/views.

I've had a number of rounds of trying to get the latest Aegir beta installed. I was getting a "can't connect to master database" error. Weird, since I could connect to the db at localhost and the FQDN.

So, I started to poke around and saw the my .drush folder contained the files:

• server_localhost.alais.drushrc.php
• server_master.alias.drushrc.php 

Those files had stale info in them. I'd evidently run the install.sh script enough times and made changes in between that something was amiss. 

 We've been working with the Sustainability site on getting webform submissions to return a chart upon submit. Gluing the two modules together requires using a Custom URL redirect in the Webform > Form Settings > Custom URL field. 

I did need to patch webform using references here: http://drupal.org/node/764762#comment-3035596

For our testing, we were using this string to get us to the chart for the node we were on:

internal:node/4/webform-results/chart

I was driven a bit crazy by trying to get the standard glossary view to show up as striped. In the views preview it worked, when looking at the page it was a solid grey. 

Two things need to be examined.

First, check the view configuration. Set the style of table to none. Set the sort order for the view. 

Second, override the modules > system > style.css entries into a local.css file. I pulled this info out to override:

I needed to come up with a solution for overriding the links in the search results for the campus map project. I've created a view that uses OpenLayers presets for getting a zoom level. In the view we use the standard node/%/map_detail path to get the detail view preset applied for the appropriate node nid.

I had a brief conversation with Pablo and Alma last week and it got me thinking about how we could prototype a method of pushing information via SMS to students. If I understand the use case, we're talking about a small population that primarily relies upon their phone for communication and is missing important campus communications sent via email, flyer, portal or US Mail. Our objective would be to push information using SMS as a supplementary protocol.

I've been working with the Campus Sustainability office to identify how we might make some changes to their look and feel as well as add some functionality. They've been limited by the old campus template and need to get a fresh look without the use of the new campus template, which won't be available to them on the short term.

I've been prototyping some new ideas to get us thinking about the roadmap for the campus map. A working demo is at http://maps-dev.ucsc.edu. The notes link below talks about the technology stack; Drupal, Gmap and Location modules were evaluated in the first round and later eliminated. I've landed on the OpenLayers and Geo modules for the type of requirements we need to meet.