Lots of catching up to do..

After being stuck with trying to fix the CAS login, Professor Johnson suggested that we move on to other parts of the mockup. I got caught up with this bug and now my Joomla mockup is behind others' CMS. So this final week of Milestone 2 will be dedicated to pumping out as many webpages as I can to catch up and have a close-to-functional website for the dorm energy competition.

For the next coming days I have some important features lined up to be implemented in my mockup site. I might also change the theme (CSS) of the website. If I find one that looks better and easier to work with then I might implement it before the end of the second milestone. Once I have enough pages done I will update you guys with screen shots of the mockup site. I have a feeling this week will be a long one..

-David Joel Lazaro

Joomla Mockups Galore

So the past week was all about building the mockups that the design group puts in the project wiki page. So far everything is going along pretty smooth. The only issue that I came across so far was the positioning of the boxes for each tab. My Joomla template has two columns for content. The left side is for other menu items such as the user menu and the latest discussion module. I still have no luck fixing the logout problem I have with the UH CAS login. I've looked at the php files for the external login module that I'm using the CAS with and I can't seem to find where it's doing the logout part. The good news is that I've read the support document from ITS and there might be an easier way to fix the logout bug that I'm having. Fixing this bug is still in my top priority for this milestone.

Another thing that I tried this past week was setting up the mockup site to a host server. I signed up for a free web hosting account at http://www.000webhost.com/. Setting up the database part was a cake. I simply exported my local database and imported it on the host server. Uploading the actual site files was the part that gave me hell. I ended up working on it for about 5 hours straight trying to get everything to work. Basically FTP won't upload some of the files from my machine. Still not sure why it wasn't letting me. I ended up trying the One Click site restore option from the host server. I had to zip the site files from my machine and upload it that way. The problem was the host would extract the directory on its own folder and not in the public folder. What I had to do was use the server's GUI setup to move the files out of that directory and into the public directory. So after about 5 hours and many trial and error, I finally have the test mockup up and running in the host server. I did this only for testing and learning purposes. This was not required for the project but I think it's a good way to learn things for future work. Stay tuned for more updates :)

-David Joel Lazaro

Plans for Milestone #2

We were really productive with the first milestone for this project, therefore we are now ready to move on to the next. So far Joomla has been on the lead in terms of getting the things we need to work. But we aren't ready to give up on the other CMS' yet. For the next milestone, we will be shifting from just getting things to work with the CMS on to actually following a mockup to replicate a somewhat final product. This way, we might discover something about the other CMS that we didn't know from the first milestone.

As I mentioned, we will be following actual mockups now. Our approach will stay the same by trying to implement things the way the CMS wants to do it. It's quite difficult to force the CMS to do something for us first beginners. One of our main focus for the next coming weeks is to try and separate the content depending on what privilege the current user has. Our site will have three users, public, admin, and participant. Each different users will be able to access different contents. Some of these features are already present in my current Joomla mockup. It's not perfect yet so I have to clean it up. I will be focusing on how the admin account will be able to administer the site using the frontend tools instead of loggin on the backend. By the end of milestone 2, we are hoping to have a usable website for the competition. Stay tuned for more updates.

-David Joel Lazaro

Kukui Cup Tech's 1st Milestone

After weeks of working with Joomla, I now have the ability to create and manage simple websites. I've learned a lot since we started working on the Kukui Cup project. This post will go through the implemented functionalities that can be used for the Kukui Cup competition.

This is the public home page. I made it so that public and registered users see different articles on the front page of the website. My public front page contains an RSS feed to Forbes.com's energy news and a sample chart made from Google Docs using their Visualization API. The energy news feed keeps the public on news that relates to the goals of this project such as energy literacy. The chart can be used to track of the daily energy usage of the participating buildings.

Another working feature for the Joomla mockup site is the implementation of UH CAS Login. I implemented it using the External Authentication plug in for Joomla. Once installed and configured, a UH user can login in fine. The only problem right now is the Logout part of this plugin. The CAS login uses session that the browser stores in memory. The plugin doesn't destroy the session instance when logging out. This results in the previous session being reused if someone tries to login right after a logout. I'm still working on getting this problem fixed. The author of the plugin is currently unavailable because he is helping with the next release of Joomla. He won't be updating the plugin until around summer time.

Once logged in, a different frontpage will be seen by the user. The registered user has access other parts of the website now. The frontpage now has a Google Calendar that would lists events for the competition. A Google Gadget is also implemented in the registered user's frontpage. For now a gadget that displays the top Green Products at Amazon is good to have. Later on the Stoplight gadget would be added to this page once its done. There's also a User Menu module on the left side which can be expanded as needed later on in the competition. The Latest Discussion module shows the latest posts from the competition forum. A workflow module is also implemented on the right. This can be useful later on for the competition administrator.

The next part is the Discussion Forum for the competition. The administrator can tweak this forum for whatever the needs of the project website. This forum is implemented by installing the Kunena plugin. The cool part of this is that it's fully integrated in the project website meaning its not running on another database. This eliminates the need for dual logins. Every website user would have a forum account automatically.

The standings page shows the implementation of two charts using Google Visualization API. Both were made from Google Docs spreadsheet. This makes it very easy and simple to create charts that shows the buildings' energy consumption. It's also easy to update the charts. Simply update the spreadsheet and Google Docs and the charts should be updated.

-David Joel Lazaro

Joomla: Status Update

So it's been weeks since this project started and I like our group's progress so far. In last week's meeting, we discussed the difficulties we faced trying to re-create the current mockup. We agreed that it's not the best way of creating a demo mockup for the competition website. Instead, we tried to replicate the mockup the way the CMS wants to do it. In other words, try to replicate most of the functions seen in the mockup even if it doesn't look exactly the same as the mockup images.

Last week, I was stuck trying to get phpBB3 to work with Joomla for our forum. I stumbled upon a Joomla plug in called JFusion. It's main purpose is to integrate other software like phpBB3 into Joomla. Installation was easy as always with Joomla. The problem is that JFusion failed to do what I wanted it to do. The dual login module of this plugin wasnt working for some reason. I spent hours reading the forums and other websites for possible fix but failed to fix the problem. After two days of trying to get it to work I finally gave up and looked for ano

ther way to get a forum running for our project. This is when I found Kunena. Kunena is so much easier to work with and the best part, it's integrated in Joomla as a module! No need for dual logins because every website user will be part of the forum. I also like that it opens up within the Joomla website instead of going to a whole new different page.

Another goal that we achieved this past week was the implementation of Google Gadgets. It's actually pretty simple to put any gadget in our Joomla website. I installed a Joomla module called Mod HTML. This allows developers to copy and paste a script and act as a module in

Joomla. I then did some manipulation to get the module to be in an article so that I can post it in the home page once the users log in. So far everything is running smooth. I have a Bejeweled game gadget on the home page of our Joomla website. I also tried to implement a work in progress Stoplight gadget that the other group is working on.

For next week, I will try and add more content to the website to have a fully working Joomla mockup site. Another feature that I will try to implement is UH's CAS login. This is what UH uses to authenticate the users of their web services. Below are some screenshots of what I have so far in Joomla.

-David Joel Lazaro

Joomla!: My First CMS Experience

Last week, our kukui tech prototype group's task was to narrow down our selection of CMS for

the project. After our first group meeting with Professor Johnson, we now have a better idea on what to look forward to with the project. Our initial comparisons consisted of 10 different CMS. We read up on Anahita, dotCMS, Drupal, Elgg, Joomla!, MODx, Ning, Pligg, Silverstripe, and Wordpress. We found a lot of good information about these CMS. We setup our review by categories which were based on what we already knew about dorm energy competition. The categories that we gave importance were ease of use, social networking, and

extensibility. We then decided as a group to select dotCMS, Drupal, Joomla!, and Silverstripe to do actual testing. My task for the coming weeks is to get familiar with Joomla and try to create mock up pages for PublicHomePage and StudentHomePage.

So far I have set up my machine (Macbook Pro) to be able to host and manage websites locally with the help of MAMP. MAMP allows me to set up my machine to act as a personal web server. After setting up the web server, I went ahead and downloaded a copy of Joomla. Setting everything up from MAMP to Joomla was pretty easy. So far, all I have are the default pages that Joomla provides. I'm still getting used to how everything works by playing around with the backend administrator settings. There are lots of things to be learned and hopefully by next week I will have a full page mockup.

-David Joel Lazaro

New Semester and New Projects

This semester, our software engineering class is all about UH Dorm Energy Competition. Our main goal for this semester is to plan and build everything for the competition for next Fall. Our class is divided into groups. Each group has a specific task that benefits the overall project. For the first milestone, I was assigned in the Kukui Cup Technology Prototypes. Our group's goal is to explore various technology infrastructures for the dorm energy competition.

For this week, our group's task is to research content management systems. So far I have read articles and watched videos about CMS such as Drupal and Joomla. Other group members are doing the same. Our plan is to meet up before our first group meeting with Professor Johnson and discuss everything that we researched so far. We will then try to come up with the best technology out there that we can implement in the dorm energy competition. The way we intend to accomplish this is by creating categories and grading each technology that we researched on. We will then tally the scores and discuss the selection before presenting it to Professor Johnson.

-David Joel Lazaro