Tech and Open Source

For the Title and Pay Plan applicaiton, we are using a technique to display information that embeds a view into a node. You might wonder huh? I know nodes. I know views. Why combine them? Here's a picture of how it is being used.

For the Title and Pay Plan project, I made extensive use of the node_import module. Here are a few of the challenges I had with getting data imported.

Background

I've been following the developments at Development Seed regarding their work in Open Atrium. Development Seed has also been working on another project entitled Aegir. From the project page: "Aegir is a set of Drupal modules that help you maintain your Drupal sites."

I've been collecting ideas to blog about. I'll give each of these its own post over the next couple of days.

As I migrated my old site off Joomla and into Drupal, I noticed it was about a year ago that I first dove into Drupal. It all began with some Lullabot training. We had hired Lullabot to provide 3 days of in-house training to about 20 staff. I find CMS's and development frameworks interesting and had been working on learning CakePHP well enough to migrate some of my custom apps from Fusebox v3 to Cake; sweet.

In August 2009, I started moving an old version of my site that had been in Joomla into Drupal. I began by migrating the articles written in Joomla (and prior to that PHP and prior to that HTML) to become pages in Drupal. Since a page typically is static content, I'll probably do some theming to mark this content as older via taxonomy settings. Some of it is ancient and isn't useful to anyone but me as I recollect decisions made about PHP programs, libraries and logic.

Two methods for inserting a jQuery snippet.

Method 1 - In the Views UI, navigate to Basic Settings > Header. In the Header, you can insert a jQuery snippet wrapped with <script> tags. This example sets links to open in a new window and provides advanced row striping for a table of data.

$(document).ready(function() { // override the anchor to open links in new window $('td.views-field-title a').click(function() { window.open(this.href); return false; }); // colorize the rows with zebra striping and highlighting $('#tpp-listing-2').colorize(); });

For the past several months, I've been working on a project to bring the Title and Pay Plan (TPP) into a more useable format. The request goes back several years to the time of the Business Transformation Program, but for a variety of reasons wasn't able to come to fruition as a web application. The TPP is where the campus tracks salary information for all classifications. Contracts change over time, so we needed a method to help the classification and compensation staff manage this complicated and data intensive material.