The second week has been very exciting and it has also proved that, eventhough making a quality website is relatively easy with drupal, it still takes quite a bit of work and fine tuning to get the site right. The site has developed in many areas. For one thing, a number of different themes were tested for a while, and in the end we decided to go back to the original drupal theme, because the other tested themes has thier problems. Some themes destorted the overall appearance of the site, some looked poor on smaller monitors with lower resolutions, some broke basic usability guidelines etc. A librarian’s menu has also been added, that puts all the esential content management features within easy reach of the librarian. Obviously, the regular users are not able to access this menu.
Getting the data from the old book database into the new database has also proved to be more challenging than anticipated, espcially since it is impossible to do bulk deletes in drupal, should anything go wrong. As a result we have to be sure that the everything works exactly as it should, otherwise, one will have delete a few thousand records manually. Fortunately, Doug was able to produce a bit of PHP code to solve this problem.
We’ve also run into another problem, as we need a page to exist in 2 different versions, depending on whether the user is logged in or not. We tried to write a bit of PHP code to check for this, but this did not work as anticipated, probably due to a bug in Drupal, so back to the drawing board we go… for now at least 
I was also introduced to really cool online feature called tadalists (www.tadalist.com), which enables you to jot down a number of things that need to be done. The really cool thing about this, is that you simple click a list item to remove it from the list. This makes it much easier to stay focused and seems to increase productivity.
That’s all for now. Untill next time…
