carthage webdev

Needless to say that ever since I bought my MacBook Pro, I don't develop on my desktop computer anymore. A DVI cable goes straight into my 26" wide screen monitor and I have all the power in the world.
jEdit was for awhile my editor of choice. It has a nice layout, secure ftp client and supports all the languages I need. The down side is it eats up too much memory and crashes quite often.
Read the rest of this entry »

Given the nature of the site we need to manage, which has lots of time-sensitive content AND lots of relatively static content, figuring out how to deal with the more static, often free-form content was a big issue for us in formulating a plan to use Django to create Sputnik. Built into Django is the notion of flatpages - static files that are served in situations where a URL doesn't map to a normal Django view/function. We were looking for something that would allow content managers to work within the standard Django admin interface to maintain the content of their basically static, free-form pages, while still taking advantage of Django's templates for basic "window dressing" kinds of stuff (banners, standard navigation, etc.)

To accomplish this we decided we'd create a beefier version of flatpages. Here's the rundown of what we wanted out of a good static-page manager.
Read the rest of this entry »

One of the only problems that has slowed us down while developing our CMS has been the steep learning curve associated with changing some functionality in the built-in admin without writing it as a custom view. This problem reared its head again when I was building the score module which essentially extends our calendar module (i.e., some calendar events happen to be athletic competitions, and athletic competitions have additional information like scores, etc.) The way we have laid things out, creating a score happens on its own page (separate from the main calendar editing page) and involves selecting the calendar item to establish the foreign key relationship between the score and calendar item. The problem was that the list of calendar items was too long - at best I could filter it so that it would only display sporting events, but I really needed to filter one step further to the specific sport.
Read the rest of this entry »

With Django 0.95 being introduced being introduced a few days ago, I figured a quick post on what we experienced installing Django might help someone out. None of this covers new ground, but perhaps another telling of the story will provide someone an extra hook to grab onto.
Read the rest of this entry »

After having written a custom LDAP authentication process for django before 'multi-auth' hit the trunk, I decided I'd rewrite what I wrote in the new and purportedly easier to use backends system. Rumors that it was chiefly because a subversion update had caused my old code to break are greatly exaggerated. (*cough*) However, I'm quite glad I decided to take the plunge. It seems Django's new backends system has really made multi-faceted authentication dead simple.
Read the rest of this entry »

We had the advantage of having built and lived with the previous content management system, so we all had a pretty good handle on what the new CMS would need to do. Most of it is pretty predictable stuff. We have news items, we have calendars of events, we have sporting events with scores, we have profiles of people, etc.

The academic departments and administrative offices all have some degree of autonomy, and so we treat them like clients. They can choose to have their sites managed through this CMS or not, and we need to be able to accommodate that. The two biggest clients are ourselves (for the home pages and other centralized content), the athletics department. Other important clients are undergraduate admissions, graduate admissions, and the music department.
Read the rest of this entry »

Having made the decision in early May to spend the summer building a replacement for Quahog, the next question was what to replace it with.
Read the rest of this entry »

As the webmaster for a small liberal arts college, I am responsible for a largish site with a very loosely defined set of controls. I inherited an environment where all of our 15,000 or so pages were maintained by hand, and have been moving toward automating bits and pieces. Two years ago, a few students (including Mike and Chris) built a content management system to manage a portion of Carthage's pages, most notably the home pages (one for on-campus and one for off-campus). That CMS, named Quahog in honor of the TV show "Family Guy," was built with Coldfusion. I'll discuss how we came to decide to move away from Quahog and Coldfusion in a subsequent post, but in a nutshell it came down to a desire on my part to learn something new rather than dissatisfaction with Coldfusion. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the ideas I had going into this summer was to maintain a blog about our experiences designing, building and deploying a content management system to run large portions of Carthage's web site. So without further ado, here we go. Ivan was kind enough to make the initial post, and now I am going to go back and start from the beginning, which in this case is the first couple weeks of May, 2006.
Read the rest of this entry »

Our application manages news items which can be assigned to any number of topics. The sequencing of the news items within each topic can be set independently of the sequencing of items in other topics. We wanted a simple drag-and-drop interface that would allow us to set the order of items in a topic.
Read the rest of this entry »