jct progress @ Monday 290909

What I did

• Ian had commented out the far right sidebar in pligg.tpl. It was still on the front page (although displaying a weird arrow) and it took off the navigation options on the profile page (which we didn’t want), so I removed the global change and looked for a more local solution. I looked at how the submit page was managed in the sidebar.tpl and sidebar2.tpl files. There was a whole bunch of stuff that was placed in a sidebar so long as “[if $pagename neq “submit”]” i.e. if the name of the page does not equal submit. I tried to add in a “ && if $pagename neq “index” “ to the end of the statement. Although it worked and took off the sidebar, it also made the footer disappear. I only realised this after making the next few changes and uploading the lot to the repository, so I had to work out how to revert the lot and start again.
• I removed the trackback box from the second submit page by commenting out the code. I labelled the section to make it easy to find.
• I removed the ‘upcoming news’ feature from the submission process and the site.

1. In the admin panel I set ‘number of votes to publish’ = 0
2. In header.tpl I commented out ‘
3. To change the redirecting from the final submission page to the upcoming page (instead to the home page) I added this code to the start of the file upcoming_center.tpl “{php} header (‘location: ‘$this _vars [‘my_pligg_base’].”); {/php}"

• After undoing it all and redoing the above two steps, I revisited why I was losing the footer when I tried to apply the same code from the submit page to the index page. I was stumped – it LOOKED the same to me. I looked at other examples of how these statements were grouped and I realised that they didn’t use a second ‘if’ in the statement. so I tried “[if $pagename neq “submit” && $pagename neq “index]” and it worked! So I sent it back up to the repository
• Manuella had trouble applying an avatar to the site the other day so I double checked that the avatar folder and user_uploaded sub folder had been CHMODed to 777, so everyone had write permission. All good there
• I made sure the entire team had ‘admin’ permission on the site, to be able to help moderate
• I removed reference to Karma and ESP points from the profile page by commenting them out. I also commented out ‘settings’ and ‘upcoming’ from the nav bar options on this page, as they were redundant
• On the front page, I commented out the ‘sort news’ options, except for ‘recently popular’, which would be our second sorting view for people to see the news (other than the main feed)
• I backed up the live site files as I worked my way through the instruction sheet I wrote up for Matt, to make sure it was clear enough and accurately captured all steps. I posted this on the uts discussion board and ran through the process with Matt at the meeting. We will now start the Tues/Thurs and Sunday backup cycle.

Later…

• After discussions at the meeting with Nathan, I went ahead and moved all of the relevant parts to the different areas, so he could just focus on the css. I moved the ‘What is Strine’ module code to the footer. I commented out the ‘top tags’ link/display (Matt had already copied this over to the section he was building the tag navigation bar, but I made sure to add a comment note so we could find it again if necessary ☺
• I went to move the ‘recently popular’ link to the navigation bar (I thought it would make sense to have it up there next to ‘latest news’). I was looking at the code and realised that it was set to display recently popular when you selected ‘recently popular’ but also when nothing was selected i.e. “ “ i.e. recently popular was the default view! This means we will need to find some other way to sort the news, to give users more options. Shall we leave in ‘today’? or do we need to look for code or a module that creates a ‘most commented’ section? That looks like the research focus for this week

To do:
Let team know to disable private message module, configure voting to publish = 0 and configure spell check ‘off’
Work out method for removing dodgy users from database completely (or could get crowded)