Done with Spring Break...

That break went by super fast! Can I get a rewind? Home (Maui) was super relaxing. It was a great time to chill and hang out with family and friends back home. But now it's time to get back to business and continue working on the Dorm Energy Competition website. As I mentioned, I will now be working with Nate as a group. Our main focus for this milestone is to figure out how the activities and goals are carried out for the competition. So far we came up with a bunch of "activity manager" type of modules that we will be testing for the next coming days.

On a side note, I've downloaded the Android SDK last week. Being a phone geek, I want to start learning how to develop mobile apps. I currently have an iPhone but Apple requires a fee to to be a developer. Android is free and is really picking up since it first came out. Didn't have the time to set up everything on my machine yet but I will soon. I'll blog about it later once I have everything set up and running. That's all for now.

-David Joel Lazaro

Milestone 3: Time to collaborate!

Milestone two came and went and now we are halfway through the semester. Our Joomla prototype has come a long way since the project started but there's still a lot of work to do. We are down to two CMS for this milestone. Our group dropped Silverstripe and dotCMS to focus more on Drupal and Joomla. My partner, Nathaniel Ashe, will be working with me to continue development for Joomla. Our plan is to continue adding features needed for the competition and combining them together at the end.

For this milestone, our focus shifts from mockups to actually developing the more necessary features of the competition like commitments, activity, and goal processing. This week, we plan to work on the illustration of kukui nuts accumulated by each floors. By the way, Kukui nuts is the point system used for the competition. So the more kukui nuts you have, it means the more points you accumulated. We are looking at using Google chart APIs for this part of the prototype. Lots of work needs to be done but collaboration should ease up the work for us a little. Stay tuned for more updates later.

-David Joel Lazaro

End of Milestone 2

Here we are finally at the end of milestone 2. This version of the Joomla mockup site is better and contains some new useful features for the dorm energy competition. Let's start by having a tour of the updated mockup site.

Here we see the homepage that the general public can access. Currently it contains a featured youtube video, a chart that shows the energy usage of the dorms, a slideshow, and a little description of what the website is about. Also on the left is the Login button that uses the UH CAS login for authenticating the participants.

The user will be taken to this page once they click on the Login button.

If the user tries to login is not listed as a participant, they will be redirected back to the homepage with an error message. Before I forget, if you look at the right side of the top menu, a random tips ticker is displayed. A new tip is displayed every time a page is loaded.

This is where things change depending on what type of permission the user has. The screen shot on the left shows the homepage for an administrator while the one on the right shows the homepage for a regular participant. There are some noticeable differences. The administrator will have an extra item on the top menu named Admin. This takes the user to the admin page where they can modify the website.

The admin also has extra items in the user menu on the left column of the page. These extra options are for adding content to the site. You'll also notice a bunch of edit buttons in the homepage. This is because the administrator have the ability to edit these items. Those edit buttons are hidden for regular participants.

Remember the error that shows up when a non-participant tries to login? Joomla actually creates a user for them but by default they are disabled. The administrator has the ability to grant them access by enabling them or the admin can also delete the user.

Nothing new with the forums page so moving along.

This page provides users with a brief overview of a Dorm Energy Competition. There are videos which will allow individuals to browse through several videos pertaining to Dorm Energy. It also contains links to other universities doing dorm energy competitions. The Resources menu contains three submenu pages, Dorm Energy, Energy Hub, and Have Fun. Only the Dorm Energy page is implemented in this mockup.

Next is a work in progress stoplight page. This page is mainly to test the stoplight group's google gadget app.

This page shows the user information about the Dorm Energy Competition.

Next is a work in progress stoplight page. This page is mainly to test the stoplight group's google gadget app.

The kiosk serves as the billboard page that will be displayed in tv monitors. This gives people a general info about the dorm competition at a glance.

This is the help page of the dorm competition website. It includes contact info incase users run into problems using the website.

This page shows upcoming events related to the competition. This menu item only shows up once the user logs in successfully.

The last two screen shots shows how the user can edit their personal info. They also have the option of posting a profile picture.

For more information about this project, please visit Google Project Hosting. There's info on how you can download and give this mockup site a testdrive on your own server. You'll also find the current status of the project there (ie. what works and what doesn't work, bugs, etc.). I will continue working and improving this prototype website.

-David Joel Lazaro

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