Jeff Chan

Robotics Team Site Remake

Thank goodness the break is finally here! As usual, my task list is full of stuff: read history chapters, book report, RuneWire client, GHOP, portfolio, robotics, various code fixes, etc. GHOP with SilverStripe has been particularly interesting. I’ve completed 6 tasks so far and I’m definitely going to do more.

I’ve been debating whether or not to move the EVHS Robotics website to be SilverStripe-powered. Previously, it had been backended with about 20 minutes worth of code that did really simple content management. I was the only one updating the content so I basically did my own HTML formatting. Now that I have the chance and I’ve never actually made a real website with SilverStripe, I decided to give it a go. The team website is now powered by SilverStripe.

A few things I’ve had to compromise or took me a little time on. I wanted to go with the Haze theme but turned out that there are a few perks with the CSS which resulted in me giving up. The default theme may be a little boring but it looks fine. Also, it had took me awhile to fix the typography stylesheet to make everything look right; I prefer bigger font sizes. I wanted to create a page with an iFrame that linked to our Google Calendar, so I had to set up a custom page type for that— pretty easy stuff.

But now with SilverStripe, I can extend the website easily now. If we needed a forum for collaboration, I could set that up integrated within minutes. This also gives me an opportunity to let my team members create accounts and manage the content.

Overall it has been nice for my first experience building a site with a MVC-based content system.

 Topics: evhs, ghop, robotics, SilverStripe

Announcing My First SilverStripe Widget

As you’ve noticed, I haven’t blogged in a while. Mainly because of working on the GHOP Contest. You can read more details about it on the site. The open source project I picked is SilverStripe. It’s basically a PHP framework that gives user-friendlyness to website authors but at the same time offer a quick and easy development framework for developers.

I’ve already finished translations for two modules and a quality assurance task. My fourth task was to build a widget. I chose to build a countdown widget because I thought that’d probably be more useful. If you want me help test it, you can download it here.

There are five event types you can choose. The widget will automatically detect/generate a pattern, so this is a one time configuration thing. Just enter in the first occurrence of an event, and you’re set. To make it timezone independent, you do have to make sure the date and time is in the same timezone as your server’s time.

 Topics: ghop, google, open source, php, SilverStripe, widget