Trying new things, finishing up old ones
23 April 05
So it's pretty obvious that I haven't been keeping up with my weekly posting of articles, but I think I might be cooking up a really interesting article that should be available in the next week or so.
First of all, I've been finishing up a lot of projects that have been lingering at Hiram College for a while. One is a brand new site for donating to the College, complete with online form using Verisign. Admittedly, it's the first time that I have put together the whole package, from reseaching what company to go with to installing the software and writing all the code. So far so good, and I'm liking the results. I'll be sure to share that with you when it's ready in mid-May.
I've also been working on a new Study Abroad site for the College, as well as a small project that is part of a grant that our Biology professor received that involves creating webpages for HP iPaqs. The iPaqs were bought as part of the grant. I already have the goods ready in Lenya to serve a slimmed down version to the handhelds and a full version to the screen, so as soon as that's ready, I'll share my experiences here as well.
There are some other things, but I've also been working on some new stuff. I've been playing around with Lenya today, trying to add a new attribute to the sitetree of a publication. For the longest time, I've been trying to figure out an easy way to create pages in Lenya that redirect elsewhere when you click on them in the navigation. There's an easy way with the XSL files in your publication, but it also involves the meta-refresh tag, and that's not what I was after. Too clunky.
I then tried doing some flowscipt based on queries in the mailing list, but no one seems to have come up with a solution either. Finally I decided, "Why not just alter the sitetree all-together?" And that's what I ended up doing! So now, when you create a new document, it also asks for a redirect URL, and if you add something there, the URL for that page in the navigation is the redirect URL you typed in, rather than the document ID! It's not perfect yet, and I submitted a query to the developers to help me out with some issues, but I hope it can be integrated into Lenya and solve one of my more pressing issues with the software.
With that, I documented the steps I took to make it happen. Since I'm not really a Java developer and I don't have a lot of knowledge of Lenya's innards, I think it might help others should they want to attempt such a task. Watch this space in the next week or so - it should be good stuff.