Zilla Smash!

Answerline is so close to done it hurts. Tomorrow’s to-do list is pretty basic.

1. Create Color Legend page
2. Finish up stale tickets and over assorted dashboard functionality
3. Ensure working functionality in all searches, ticket actions, etc.
4. Check code for commenting, consistency, and anything brain-dead I might’ve done while half asleep.
5. Bug the other staff to try and get them to test it one last time
6. Backup old Answerline DB at the same time, so everyone gets a clean slate after this.
7. Move Student class, Ticket class, Tier class, Search class, PersonSearch class, and any other shared files back into the shared director and check them in.
8. Remove any shared files that have been living in Answerline’s CVS because I am lazy
9. Merge Rewrite_2005 branch with HEAD
10. Fix the millions of bugs caused by the merge
11. Commit changes to HEAD
12. Remove old Answerline DB tables
13. Empty out new Answerline tables
14. webupdate shared
15. webupdate answerline
16. Test to make sure I didn’t destroy everything
17. PARTY

My “not-gonna-call-it-dashboard” idea (:P Nick) was okayed by Deb yesterday and I spent some time today polishing it up a bit. JPGraph made making a pie graph that was an image map about the easiest thing ever. I always forget just how great it really is.

The concept behind the dashboard is that most staff don’t really need the functionality offered by advancedFind. It’s a very powerful page, but with a limited amount of usefulness for the most common actions you would want to do in Answerline. For most everyone, the left sidebar has exactly what they need for finding tickets to work on. So intead of forcing you to bookmark a search or always having to click past a page you don’t use I thought that creating a simple overview page would be helpful. The main goal on this page is giving the user a look at what types of tickets are open, which ones need the most attention, and helping them to keep track of the status of their recent & oldest tickets.

It’s still a little more spartan than I envision it being, but it’s a good start and was fun to do. No AJAX or crazy JS here just yet, I can’t think of a good use for them and keeping it simple is important. No one wants a slow-loading initial page.