Database Refresher

Ok, so we are able to stay with our groups and continue to work on the same project!!! But what we have ahead right now is a bit complicated. It is a refresher of ICS 321 which deals with databases and MySQL.

So, as of right now my group and I is trying to figure out how to follow the verification process in the UseCaseActivity. We have some ideas, but trying to remember what we learned in ICS 321 is kind of holding us back. However, the following image is what we have so far.

Hopefully we can remember how everything works and get this schema working with our website.

Milestone 3

Alright!!!! These past couple of days has been really hectic, because my group member Joel and I needed to create a Joomla! module by today and we only had about a week and a half. It was super hard in the beginning because we both had no php experience and we didn't really know how and where to start. But looking back now, we both learned something very valuable, and I think we both can create Joomla! Modules pretty easily now. There were many sources we had to go through but mainly the book we had helped us the most. The resources we used can be found here.

What we followed to create our Joomla! Module was the UseCaseActivity. The Admin and User will "follow" these steps to post, accept, answer, do..... on the website. As you can see, the UseCaseActivity is very very very long, and the user and admin has many steps that they go through to just post and accept things. So, did we finish all of it... I wish!!! BUT the amount that Joel and I did so far is pretty good from starting with no experience.

To finish what we have, Joel and I split up the creation of the module. Joel took what was the Admins Back End and I took what was the User Front End.

So, to see what I did here are some pictures:




When the user logs in and navigates to the Activities/Events tab, This is what they will see. Now events posted by the admin has a "type" field where they select either Action or Event for the Activity. Then on the Front-End they will be filtered to their respectable spots under their type. And the user could choose to do an action or attend an event.

Actions are simple things around the dorm room or campus. The user/participant, I should say, could change a light bulb in the room or on campus (if allowed by the school).

Events are things such as a convention or concert.



When the user decides to choose one of the events, they will see this page. For now I did not make the event very descriptive, but the user will mostly see description of the event, what they have to do, and things that could be learned such as the video above.

To display these two pages the admin would post events on this page:



And for the two pages I created, they grab that information from the Joomla Database which is in the next picture.




Now for those of you who want to use a CMS, learning some SQL will help you a lot also.

The hard part of splitting up in this Milestone was how we both named things differently from the book that we used. And at one point it took me over a day to figure out why something was not displaying, and it was just because the database had a different name. So, when separating the workload, have some kind of structure or naming.

OK, so this is what I have done and if you read Joel's Blog, you can see what we have done. There are a lot of things that still need to be done on the UseCaseActivity, But I think we can do it. I just hope I don't switch from Joomla! because it has been a really great CMS to me, unlike the other on I worked on....

Creating a new Module

As for the last time I blogged, I said that I found the perfect module that will do what we needed for this milestone. I was wrong and didn't follow these guidelines that we need to follow for the participants and admins to easily post or see events.

By looking at the guidelines, there is no such module that will do what is needed to be done. So the awesome module that I found, Seminar for Joomla, will not be used for this milestone. However, it is a great module for events.

By not knowing about the guidelines, we are now behind for this milestone because to do the guidelines, we need to create our own module. Creating a new module is very difficult and at this point in the milestone, I do not believe we will be able to finish and have a running module.

The Perfect Module for Our Website

Spring break is over and now it is time to start working on the UH Dorm Energy Competition Project again. From the last time i blogged, I said I am working with David now on a great new CMS Joomla.

This time the goal is to figure out how the activities and goals for the participants and admins will be carried out. And I found the perfect module that will do what we need to do. Seminar for Joomla. For the activities and goals for the participants and admins we need to have something that will display to the participants events that they can participate in by signing up for it, know the start and end dates, and location. And for the admins, something they can easily just sign into the website and post a new event and manage it. Awesomely, Seminar for Joomla can just do all that.

Milestone 3 Beginning

For Milestone 3, my group is cutting down the CMS's from 4 to 2, and unfortunately I had to give up SilverStripe. I think SilverStripe is a great CMS, but I believe because it is fairly new, there is just too many problems and not much documentation.

One of the problems I found from SilverStripe was tinyMCE, and the fix could be found here. This little/tiny thing would comment out any script or other html tags that you put into it. So, for the UH Dorm Energy Competition Project which needs graphs, videos, and scripts; it would not allow any of it on the site.

Another problem is things such as themes are not standardized within the SilverStripe community. When I had a layout on one theme and needed to change to another, the layout I had did not transfer over and certain things did not work.

The biggest problem that made a huge deal with the project was the CAS Login System. SilverStripe did not support it. Also, there is no documentation and no one could answer my post about it.

But besides these problems, I think that SilverStripe has potential.

So, I am joining David to work with the CMS Joomla. I am excited to work on this CMS because it has been around for a while and there is plenty of documentation.

So, tune in next week and I'll show you what we have put together for the UH Dorm Energy Competition so far.

End of Milestone 2

We have finally reached the end of Milestone2 and my group Kukuicuptech1 has pulled our hair a lot trying to make our CMS work.

Some main things that my CMS does not do is the CAS login. There is a module called External Authentication which can do what the title says, but not CAS. I posted on the Silverstripe forum for help in the CAS login but unfortunately no one answered. Also, the last person who did post something about CAS login did not get an answer.




So instead of keeping on trying to do the CAS login, I worked on the layout of the website following the Mockup provided by the Design team. Now I tried changing some parts around to have a layout to choose with my group's CMS. So instead of having tabs along the top of the website, I had the tabs on the left side.

This is my home page where users will automatically go to first.


The next page under would be the Kukuicup page.


The next under would be the resource page which talks about energy saving. As sub pages, I put in the games provided by the design team for users to play with.




The Last pages would be the login and logout pages. Now, since I could not apply the CAS login to my website, I just used what the CMS had. Silverstripe has two different ways of logging in. One for the admin and one for a regular user. So I could not make the login to just have one place to login. I had to make two different links for people to login.




When someone logs in there will be other tabs that will come up. One is the user's page and the logout button. The user's page will contain information about the user's energy savings and the logout button will just logout the person. It does look funny though that the login tab is still there when someone logs in but if that is not the person's login they could go to the login and login as themselves.

To use my website that I have built with SilverStripe, click here.

Milestone 2 Stuck

Hello everyone. As of right now my whole group is stuck at getting the CAS login to work for each of our CMS'. But for interest of time and being told by our professor, we are going to press on with other parts of our project and leave the CAS login on the side for now.

At least for my group's CMS', they are able to have the CAS login to actually login via a module. Silverstripe has no CAS login module, but it has a module for external authentication which I am trying to use. I put a post on the SilverStripe Forum and have gotten no response yet and the last post about a CAS login was from someone 4 months ago and they don't even have a response for one yet either. However, despite this setback, I notice through my post others are looking for this solution also because people are visiting my post. If I am able to actually make the login work then the SilverStripe community will benefit from what I find.

So as of right now, I am working on the layout of the site following the Mockups provided by the design group. I don't really have any problem yet but just looking at .css and php files.