SOHO Life - HKDUG Group Project

John is off to Vietnam today for a week of vacation.

I think most likely we will have a meeting next week, a week night, at SOHOlife's place, we all can sit around the table and work on the site together. This will put our last lesson on SVN to the test. Our whole process can be documented and put online as a case study.

I'll check with SOHOlife to see which night is good.

Thanks all!

I am interested in this.

Not sure how much work is involved but we may need both Thu and Sat just in case?

I'm on a school trip with the kids this Saturday, sod's law! Though if Saturday is good for everyone and it goes into the evening then I can make Saturday evening.

I could bring my SLR camera - don't have wide lens though.

I'm cool with any of the above options.

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Dave Hansen-Lange
Web Developer
Advomatic LLC
East Asia Office
Hong Kong

John and I will be there tomorrow @ 5 to start talking to the people at SOHO to gather some requirements. So if you can come early, feel free to do so.

See you all tmrw.

http://maps.google.com.hk/?q=148+Connaught+Road+Central,+Hong+Kong+Islan...

I'm on my way now though expect to arrive slightly late. ~7.30pm

just took a look - they have infinite bandwidth! and this month they had already used 10GB of bandwidth! Anthony said they paid about HK$1000 / year for this, and the contract ends next August. So... what can we use this space for?

I'm going to try out webform now and try to make a few sample forms.

I see we need to talk about input formats and filters. Someone has added several html tags to the default "Filtered HTML" format. This is safe only as long as untrusted users cannot post comments or nodes. Which is true on this site, but not something that you should rely on. I'm pasting a recent rant I gave to my coworkers below:

There’s been a few instances in the last month or so where I’ve navigated to admin/settings/filters of a few different sites and discovered that anonymous users have permission to post just about anything they please.

Please know that anonymous users can use any HTML tags permitted by the default input format. On most sites this is the Filtered HTML format.

If you want the full list of non-depricated tags that are safe try:

What usually happens is that content admins on a site need to use more HTML than what Filtered HTML allows by default. And so someone goes over to the admin page and adds things like img, embed, or object tags to the list. I have yet to see script tags enabled for the default filter, but that would be truly catastrophic.

Instead, what should happen is the user picks a different input format for their text-field. I can hear your pleas already: “That’s a pain in the butt to pick a different input filter every time you want to create a new node”. And you are correct. Enter Filter Defaults module. This allows you to specify a default filter for every role.

The root of this confusion has to do with a few naming inconsistencies and a lot of usability issues with the different admin forms. These will likely be fixed in Drupal 7, but until then keep this stuff in mind.

--
Dave Hansen-Lange
Web Developer
Advomatic LLC
East Asia Office
Hong Kong

Hi All,

Just a note. I have disabled all caching on purpose as it is very annoying to have to clear the cache each time we make a small change to the theme.

Obviously once this site moves into Production we should activate caching and compression for performance reasons.

Thanks!

Ca-Phun

Thanks, Nick! Today I found the content translations is done already.

This week my office move to another new place. I need to tidy up and set up all stuff, that is my excuse :P Hopefully, we will meet each other on Saturday.

John how's your Thanksgiving dinner?

Or rather, our page http://www.hostgrown.com/~soholife/ is messed up in IE.

The whole flash thing in the middle has moved to the right a little, and the right sidebar is forced to down below.

The drop down menus are looking pretty messed up in IE. If the jQuery roll down menus prove too much for IE, we just just turn that off for IE right? Let them use plain old CSS.

I'm also trying to encourage them to open up their teaching materials and put everything online under Creative Commons license... I think a couple of things need changing in their website - 1) the menu - they don't have enough contents so the menu is quite meaningless! I already merged "Contact us" to go under "About SOHOlife", I think they said the "Kids" link can also go as they don't have classes for Kids no more. What's a good menu name for their teaching materials online? I want to put in a new menu item like "Open Coursewares" and under it, they can put their lessons online. Also, they wanted a "forum", but I think we can add a menu item called "Community" or something, we can add an "events" content type for them to post about events (like Open Everything), and a "Student Questions" content type for students to ask questions or something...

The #2 that needs changing is their front page, we copied their old webpage but the lack of info + the block of useless flash pictures really suck... I think the front page should be in Chinese, has some info about their company and may be a jCarousel that shows the latest "events" or "lesson" nodes... (I've been itching to use Karim's jCarousel ever since he demo'd it :)

So, I'm going to start messing around in the dev environment now.

Ya, at this point, we don't need to copy their old site. I'm fixing their menus so they look nicer.

I swapped the colors in Primary Links (background from white to green, words from green to white), 'coz I think that makes the menu stands out more and separate header from content area.

Disabled the entire Header Links (HOME | Location | My Account | Login). People can click on the logo for home. Location is useless. I moved my account to Navigation, and Login / Logout to Primary links (the last item). I think that makes the header area cleaner.

The length of the menu items are not consistent, that looks kinda ugly.

The fonts used are Framework's default, I don't know much about fonts but I think I would just copy whatever some nice looking sites do...
- like apple.com = "Lucida Grande","Lucida Sans Unicode",Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;
- and my blog = 'Lucida Grande',Geneva,Arial,Verdana,sans-serif; :D

caphun, you're the jQuery expert, feel free to do your magic and teach the rest of us about it. & I'm sure u know about the form-builder - http://www.lullabot.com/blog/drupals-form-building-future - I read that this uses your jQuery UI, feel free to grab that module too!

I've continued to polish the contents on the dev site, including a better webform, a new content type called "Events" and a view to display events with page path "club".

I also switched on the forum module, it had the "left sidebar" there which I thought was kinda unnecessary so I tried copying the page.tpl.php into forums.tpl.php and commented in the "left sidebar" part, cleared cache... boom, now it looks messed up! (I used svn add forums.tpl.php to add the new file to the repository... the thing that I don't know is, how do we see the lists of comments / changes on commit?

Anyways, I think the site is looking pretty good already... we are definitely free to be more creative now and make the site look and function more "up to western standards". The management at SOHOlife probably doesn't see the value of having a good website (I don't think they're too impressed), but I've spoken to their teachers, I think they're more excited about this. Oh! I've asked them to sign in and I'll give them "Editor" permissions so they can start writing some sample contents. Next, I think I'll try to get Haggen So from Creative Commons HK to explain to the management at SOHO, why is it a good idea to use CC. We can probably have them revise the "terms and conditions" statements and help us with labeling the contents with CC!

Things that still needs to be done:

1) pathauto - would be better if "events" and "forum" content types are added to the URL path, eg: www.soholife.hk/en/forum/a-new-topic or www.soholife.hk/zh-hant/events/open-everything-hk-2008

2) forums template + general theming / layout improvements

3) set up cron

4) create new content types under "OpenCampus" (probably need to get feedback from their teachers as to what type of stuff they will write about.

5) launch it ASAP - even if we're not done yet, I think it's good enough to let them run w/ it while we continue to mess around.

Anything else?

Hey guys, ready or not, our baby has to go life! I just found out that their DNS registration is going to expire next month... and I think their hosting is expiring on the 31st of this month.

I'll check w/ the Soho people but I think I'm going to flip the switch and point soholife.hk, sohopro.hk, soholife.com.hk, sohopro.com.hk ALL to our site on hostgrown.com.

Caphun, can you fix the jquery menu roll down on IE? BTW, read about the "context" problem of users don't know where they are at, and this module helps - http://drupal.org/project/menutrails . We can actually take the roll down menu out and forget about mimicking their flash site.

Got some news to report guys!

Our site is now live at:

http://www.soho.edu.hk
http://www.soholife.hk
http://www.sohopro.hk

It was weird I couldn't log into any of them at first, I saw that there was a soho.edu.hk/~soholife/* still attached to the end of the Http_Host / Domain Name, so I checked the URL alias in Drupal admin, nothing I could do there. Then I checked .htaccess file, found this line:

So I commented it.

Still didn't work, so I checked settings.php. I found:

So I changed it to soho.edu.hk. Now all is fine. Yay~~ Well, not all... I'm trying to redirect everything to soho.edu.hk by mod_rewrite. It's not working. Can someone point out my mistake?