PHP linking and why it's cool

PHP is useful. It is one of the primary functions that is making this site easier and is very powerful when treated right. The fact that I am only using it for cross-site linking at the moment does not reduce its effectiveness.

PHP linking at its most basic allows with a short line of code (<?php include ($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/path_to_file.php'); ?>) for the content of the page at the path to be put into a page in pace of that line.

I've started by using this to put the header, navbar and footer in a single file which is linked by php to each page on the site. What this means in practical terms is if I or a future webmaster wanted to do something, such as add a new link or change the header picture, all we would have to do is change it in that one file and it would change across the site. The benefits are obvious no longer requiring a change to be arduously added to every page individually.

I have taken this a step further by recently integrating the news items into a similar system. The old and new system are shown below in a diagram but essentially the old method involved a news item being written on the front page and then possibly deleted or copied and pasted into the archive (which was just a big page that just grew and grew).

With the new system all news items are written as individual php pages which are then linked to the front page by php. When ready they can simply be removed and added to the archive with the same single line of code. This makes the process much shorter and easier and also allows all items to be added to the archive making the site much more historically functional.

I still haven't decided where these items are going to go in the folder structure (they're currently in /includes (php includes) but I'll probably move them to /new_archive)

- Chris

20/01/2012

Emails and the subscription buttons

While not on the initial plan I decided to change the way we send out emails. We previously used groupspaces as an email address database and sending service. Unfortunately through use by multiple parties the database had been split into multiple overlapping groups many of which were sent emails in one large group.

While this was perfectly workable I decided I'd like to offer the possibility of smarter emails to the club. I therefore downloaded the database of 979 assorted addresses into excel, I then cut this down to 551 through removing duplicates and unnecessary and then began sorting them into lists such as current members, each of the teams, commitee, new members etc. etc.

This allowed me recently to do simple tailoring like only sending new member related emails to the relevant members rather than the whole club. I am planning to bring my laptop to the club at some point in the future to try and fill in this list a bit better where I wasn't able to guess the person from the address.

Since I was sending out emails personally I whipped up a quick html background and some links which weren't possible on groupspaces. I also added an unsubscribe link recently to the top of emails and a subscribe to email link on the front page which sends emails to my address with additions to the email list.

I have also started adding a list of nearby opens to the bottom of emails, it requires a little looking up to get information like distance and the closing dates but I think the result is worth it.

- Chris

20/01/2012

What this is and some stuff that has been done

So I decided on further reflection I was going to stick up a blog to talk about stuff on the site when I don't feel like coding.

I'll be the first to admit that my entire knowledge of coding is based on ad-hoc use of online tutorials with a fail-and-try-again methodology. With this in mind much of what I've done is compartmentalized as much as possible to be adaptable and plenty of stuff I did when first building this site has now been removed.

My ultimate objective of the site (which I admit I may not fully be able to achieve due to simple time and ability constraints) is to reduce as much as possible the coding knowledge required to keep this site up to date and functional. Nevertheless I have also taken on the considerable task of moving the massive content efforts of my predecessor to a new format which is easier to update and handle and more inter-operable.

The reason for the new site was quite simply making it more open to editing. The previous site was built in Microsoft Publisher which while perfectly fine editing in Publisher would not work well in other WYSIWYG editors. Additionally while WYSIWYG is all fine and good to a point, it is not a good platform to grow a site from if a Comms officer arrives who has the capability to add advanced function to the site.

While I initially tried to update the site I found the code too cluttered and decided to rebuild from scratch using a standard three column css based design. I chose CSS in order to make the design easy to modify to future tastes and for my own purposes I chose a simple white background scheme.

The new site is now up and functioning although there is still a lot of content to bring through from Liam's site which will precede my own ideas for what I would like to do with the site. The sheer volume of legacy archive and news items drowns out other concerns.

Recently after a long battle I completed a functional drop down select archive menu. I eventually got this working through HTML frames and later linked this in with php (see above). While the frame still won't auto-resize for reasons unknown to me, the functionality is sufficient to leave as a future bug to squash.

The archive is now fully functional and just waiting to be filled with items.

- Chris

20/01/2012