PatCavit.com

The new tekhelp site went live today. Aside from the slight issue of the main site not being ready, it’s pretty cool to know that if you visit http://restek.wwu.edu/tekhelp/ it’ll be going to our new WordPress-powered site.

Getting WordPress to function as a CMS in the way I wanted was a bit of a chore. It took a lot of hacking on the theme and a lot of thinking to get stuff working properly. Hopefully it’s all settled down by now. Michael came up with another awesome design and he and I got it into HTML. From there it was just a matter of shoving that into a WP theme and giving it some content. As much as possible I’ve tried to use functionality native to WP (lots of the links are managed in WP links manager, posts are normal posts, pages, etc). I ran into some issues when I tried to use relative links like /tekhelp/calendar/ unfortunately. It appears that WP by default will append http:// to the beginning of a link if it isn’t already there. This is a bit of a silly assumption, and I wish there was an option to disable it. Unfortunately, I don’t think one exists and I couldn’t see any way to override that functionality via a plugin. Into the WP code I dove, and commented out the offending lines. I’ve tried to add lines similar to “//HACK” anywhere that I’ve actually had to edit the WP source code. The hope is that makes stuff easier in the long run.

Sitzmar and I are continuing to work on this Conference Services project. It’s tricky to figure out all the details, since this is a pretty large project. We’re getting there though. Today Sitzmar started making stubs for some of the classes we’ll need, and I was able to get a basic edit page up and running. Tomorrow I’m hoping to have time to design some sort of interface for adding a new group, defining a timespan for them, etc. A lot of the code I’m writing right now won’t be usable in the final product without some pretty serious tweaks, but since it was knocked out in almost no time at all I guess that isn’t a huge problem.

Viewing one week of data

Edit one week of data for the selected group

View entire schedule for selected group