drupal

OK .. rough notes on work in progress of the hot seat software ... basically so I can remember how to do it again.

There are quite a lot of settings to get right. Some through drupal, others on a shell on the webserver ( or however you mod the files on there )

Its work in progress but at this date can be found at http://hs.technologyandsocialaction.org

Leonie recently asked me to add a feature to the technology and social action web site that allows participants to categorise the content on the site with their own tags. This we enabled by using the community tags module. She also asked to add a feature where a user tags would be available on their profile page. This took a little more work as this feature required a new module writing. I've just finished it.

As facilitator i'm increasingly being faced with the importance of understanding the underlying architecture of drupal, as i keep finding that the ideas i want to implement don't fit the tools. I'm sure at the same time, that the tool offers features that could be used very creatively (eg game design capitalises on the use of the computer's clock) if i understood the nodal structure better. Its an interesting challenge for Alan and I to communicate without a visual map and a common language.

The recent pradsa2 workshop at University of West of England had a session on decision making. Our group decided assess the design decisions in developing this web site. I'll start putting my understanding of that process here.

Before the first workshop I perceived the site to be a place where people would come to ( ie log in ), produce content ( ie blog stuff, post forum questions ), building a corpus of examples and knowledge.

Created a custom block with the below php code and then disabled the drupal built in navigation block

<?php
global $user;
if ($user->uid) {
if ($menu = menu_tree()) {
   echo "";
   echo "
";
   print $menu ;
   echo "
";
   echo "";
}
}
?>

Used the taxonomy_access module to create public and private tags. Anonymous users can see the public tagged content but only registered users can see the private content.

plagiarised a quick php sql query to list all registered users and links to there profiles.

<?php

$header = array(
array('data' => t('Username'), 'field' => 'u.name', 'sort' => 'asc')
);
$sql = "SELECT u.uid, u.name FROM {users} u WHERE u.uid > 1";
$sql .= tablesort_sql($header);
$result = pager_query($sql, 50);

$status = array(t('blocked'), t('active'));
while ($account = db_fetch_object($result)) {