website

Been poking around at the web interface, reviewed the wiki module to see if it's callable from outside code, doesn't look like it so added a website wishlist item.

Poked around bugzilla database to see how tables are laid out and what we could read for a summary page. Probably just need to keep projects=products, don't see where users are located in db.

Checked postgres docs to see if they support file types for rows, this could be a way to keep our data in files and just reference the relational structure from web. Doesn't look like this comes out of the box, at least not in the d

It would be good to be able to invoke the wiki filter (and really any filter) from php code in books and static pages, or other modules. The motivation here is that the raw structure of text could be in a fundemental markup (lyx, xml, whatever) which could then be rendered appropriately to the screen.

Currently the print() functions in PHP aren't elibible for wiki markup translation. This means you need to write that print out in pure html, which is a little inflexible.

Create a tie-in to bugzilla data by hooking in bug database on backend.

A collection of small improvments were made to the site.

* Figured out how to create blocks that only show up on specific pages: add a "path" string (regex) to the block's definition. The regex needs to be surrounded by "<" and ">" symbols but can be quite complex. See the [block help|http://lab.ac.uab.edu/admin/help#block]. There's also an entry in a [Drupal Forum|http://drupal.org/node/view/3371] on some addition options. (They forgot to mention the <> delimiter's importance...syntax error!)

* Found out about a mailing list to news gateway service for many popular mailing lists called [gmane|http://gmane.org]. This may help us avoid the need to set up our own news gateway, at least for public lists. There are still some advantages for our on supplied lists (read cms integration interfaces).

Finally got rewrite rules to work. The key was to properly define the rewrite condition so that just the portion of the path that I intended to rewrite was rewritten. I probably need to add extra args if I want to replace the path. In anycase, the old metric project namespace now works with the lab web site, eg http://lab.ac.uab.edu/projects/im/doc/im.html and http://metric.it.uab.edu/projects/im/doc/im.html are equivalent.

As an added bonus, the new project namespace is also gaining support. The project page is now reachable via http://lab.ac.uab.edu/project.

I've added a couple of sites to the [Site Cloud|http://lab.ac.uab.edu/cloud]. This is a simple tool to help track changes to websites. We can use this tool for a general sense of a "what's new" feature from the different sites. We want to be watching the page for the site that contains their news items. This is typically the site's home page. Feel free to add other sites. Consider it our "links to projects we depend on" container.

I've updated the wiki.module with a minor fix that allows it to cooperate with the admin pages. Mainly it doesn't just barf it's help text into every admin window. Outside of that, the module appears to still work it's filtering magic. You can read more about the markup rules on the [phpwiki site|http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/TextFormattingRules]. I'll leave it in place for now to see if there are other areas that need updating.

We've updated the website to Drupal 4.3. This is has some significant improvements over the 4.2 release and represents a nice level of feature refinements for the 4.x series. You can find out more about the 4.3 release at the Drupal website.

Along with this upgrade, several features have been added to the site. In general, we've opened up the site considerably. Anyone interested in taking a more active role in the activities of the lab is encouraged to register for an account. Annoymous users aren't shut out though, they can create static pages or submit stories. This helps us capture the free spiriti of the wiki world with some of the extra features of a CMS.