Yikes! I completely forgot to blog daily as agreed. Okay, here we go.
Wednesday and thursday were spent actually playing around with Drupal to gain an understanding of how it functions. This went pretty well, as we managed setup the main pages for the site and to crossreference them. We also installed and enabled a number of nessesary modules, which were:
- blog: enabling the librarian to post relevant newsitems on the front page
- tinymce: a sort of simple text editor similar to the wordpress “write post” page
- comment: allowing people to comment on newsitems, and later on, their experiences with any book in the library database.
- node_import: for importing the library book database
- page: used for displaying regular text
- poormanscron: automatically runs cron, which run maintainance operations on the server in the backgroud
- search: for finding content
- contact: provides an easy way for users to contact the librarian
- menu: allows the user to customize the navigation menus
- add_n_reference: allowing users to enter content into a database field, that is linked to another database.
- etc…
Friday was spent planning the book database and playing around with the node_import module for importing content from the existing book database. The import turned out to work fairly easily when the excel database was opened in open office and saved as a CSV file, since OO allowed the user to define the symbols for the separator. Furthermore, the book “defining web usability” by Jakob Nielsen, was checked out of the library to help with my thesis.
The weekend was spent playing around with themes.
