December 2006 Archives

For a three years now, one of my favorite IT tools on my bat-belt has been RT
from Best Practical
. RT (Request Tracker) is just another bug/incident tracker, but it's got a lot of great features like seamless email integration, highly customized access control, a self-service web site, and the ability to make public replies and private comments on any ticket in the system (allowing you to keep the shop talk as technical as you need to record solutions while only giving the end-user an overview of the solution).

I noticed in the last couple months that Best Practical has created a new service web site called Hiveminder
, which is basically just a to do list manager. However, as to do list managers go, it's pretty nice. I've been using it for a week now just to see how I like it. The jury is still out on that one.

Of course, I'm never satisfied with just seeing a service, I wanted to know how it worked. I initially thought that Best Practical might have adapted their RT to handle to do lists (which wouldn't be very hard) and added some nice JavaScript front-end enhancements. That is not, however, what they did. They've been building a web development framework called Jifty
on which Hiveminder is built. This isn't really news, but it was news to me so I added it to my list of things to look into when I had the time.

This weekend I decided to finally install it and give it a shot. So far it's wowed my socks off. Before this web site became just another part of my blog, I was working on a web framework. So far, Jifty is the web framework I would have written if I'd really had the time and experience to make it happen. I'm building a very small image gallery application to see if I can get something more to my liking than anything I can fid that's already written. I'd say that after a few hours (thoroughly interrupted by feedings and calming a 1 week old) I'm well on my way to something very nice.

If you're familiar with DBIx::SearchBuilder
(used extensively by RT and, I believe, written for it) or with the internals of RT, Jifty will look familiar as well. They've reused a lot of similar ideas. For example, Jifty::DBI
is the database development framework, which is pretty much a rewrite of DBIx::SearchBuilder with a lot of the functionality that RT extended it with and an extensible new way of writing database schemas. Jifty itself does almost everything for you automatically and then you can choose which parts of the built in functionality to override. It provides some nice tools for making your site look really nice and have that all-in-one-page-Ajax-feel.

Anyway, I'm pretty excited to see what I can do with it. If I successfully put together the image gallery application, you can look forward to seeing it here sometime during the next month.

Cheers.

I'm kind of excited to have an article
listed on the front page of Perl.com
, one of the sites run by O'Reilly & Associated
publishers. I hope it will be the first of several and my employer has offered to let me spend time during work developing articles such as this.

Anyway, if you have any interest in using Java, Perl, or just the Content Repository API for Java from Perl, read my article on Perl.com: Using Java Classes in Perl
.

Cheers.

The last update I had for the church web site
was in August
. I'm now proud to announce that the new design that Jay Risner put together for us is now online. I want to use this blog to briefly talk about the design, but mostly to map out where I hope to take the site next.

Design and Administration

The design mostly speaks for itself, though there's one hidden piece which is kind of handy. One of the difficult things about Drupal from a design standpoint is the fact that the CMS backend isn't in a backend. That is, with many other CMSes out there, such as WordPress, Joomla, and Magnolia you work in a separate interface to do the work of creating new stories and articles. The web designer doesn't have to cope with these at all because no casual visitor will ever see them. With Drupal, however, the admin interface is integrated with the front-end of the web site. Drupal merely adds another set of administrative menus and screens into the front-end. Thus, you have a long set of menus that your design has to cope with.

In the case of the new New Hope Church design, you can't just let this menu go into the sidebar because the sidebar was designed to be simple. The solute we came up with was to create an extra sidebar that sits in the brown background to the left side. I got the idea for this from the Trac
web site which places a menu on the left side of the main column and ads on the right. Since Jay's original design was so well-structured, it was really just a matter of creating an extra float to sit off to the left to work it in.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead to what I would like to do with the site next I see a number of different sub-projects that need to be handled. The most obvious is a few incremental improvements to the new design. I cobbled together the current front-page and I don't really care for it. I need to get all the pieces of the front-page looking and fitting together better. I would like to move the login to a bar just under the banner. I would like to get all the columns laid out and pretty. I would like the directions to include a map. I would like the Flash banner to look better when Flash isn't available. Etc.

Speaking of maps, I would like to incorporate more maps into the site. There are a number of nifty things we can do with maps if we just take the time to implement them. For example, our church considers the central gathering to be only a small part of what we do. We could make that much more obvious if we added a map of the LIFE groups and other smaller meetings that take place throughout the week. Being in a college town, we send out quite a few members and it would be nifty to see a map of where our "alumni" have gone.

I would like to make it a community organization tool. I would like to see members come to the web site to find out when and where things are happening. It would be nifty if there was a way for groups to record recent happenings for their members to read about. It could even include things like a current list of prayer requests and other information. This would allow alumni and those who missed something to keep up with their groups similar to the way I keep up with friends I don't hear from often via Facebook
. It could help facilitate discussions such as helping to arrange who's going to bring meals to a family or who's bringing which dish to a supper meeting. This could help avoid the mess of email lists each group maintains themselves.

A frequent request is for a member directory to be placed online. This could be done if access to the directory was regulated appropriately. It would be great to be able to have this information online for people to change as soon as the move or to let former members keep their information available for anyone who wishes to stay in touch.

And finally, back to the mundane, the site is really disorganized right now. I need to establish some order for the site if any of this is to work in a way that will be useful. Since I'm hoping to allow the structure to be somewhat organic, the structure must be somewhat fluid so that it can grow and flex to fit differing needs. On the other hand, certain pieces of information need to be highly structured (such as information about leadership, beliefs, and other fact sheets) and I need to provide for this as well.

Anyway, there's a lot to do on the site. I just hope that I have time (or help!) to get it done with a baby due any day now.

Cheers.