Updates

Here’s the site where we can publish lab information.  For more info on this project, see:

Project: CLAS Pages Labs Site

In an earlier post, we described a need to replace the generic labels for categories and tags with the custom category and tag base names used on this site, see: References to Categories and Tags.

Crystal Barton has created a Translucence child theme that fixes this problem by getting the custom category and tag base names programmatically.  I posted Crystal’s solution to the WordPress StackExchange site, see:
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/66600/how-can-i-include-custom-category-and-tag-base-in-template-files/69422

I just created a custom menu in the top navigation and added a link to the Google Project Doc as well as a link to the “Updates” category where we can keep notes on our progress and invite others to comment.

Ideally, all the posts that contain lab information could be generated from and updated via information in a Google spreadsheet.  However, while we have a technique for programmatically generating posts from a spreadsheet, we do NOT yet have a way of programmatically updating existing posts with new info from a spreadsheet.

The lab information in the lab “posts” is reasonably well structured, but I think we could refine the language and layout a bit more.  for more information on this in a format were you can insert comments, see the project Google Doc:
Project: CLAS Pages Labs Site > Post Template

Read more…

We changed what information is shown when viewing a list of labs.  Specifically, we limited the display to the Lab location, its specifications and software.  This allows users to quickly see:

• which labs have Windows 7
• what software is installed in Mac Labs
• which labs have JAWS

This new compact view doesn’t let you see the lab maps immediately, so it does require more clicks to see which labs have available stations…  Special thanks to Aaron Forsyth for this suggestion.

We have updated the OAT site so that it now includes pages with contact information for all OAT staff, included associated staff.  See:

• http://pages.charlotte.edu/oat/team
• http://pages.charlotte.edu/oat/associated-staff

Next step is to update those lab manager links on this site that did NOT have page on our main OAT site.

This site uses categories to organize info about labs by building, department and OS.  Tags are used to indicate the software available in a given lab.  We were able to update the permalink structure to reflect this usage of categories and tags by creating custom category and tag base names.  However we have not figured out how to use these custom names in template pages.  For this reason, this post is displayed on a page titled “Categories > Updates.”  It should “Specifications > Updates.”

We could create a child theme that hard codes in these custom base names, but that’s not very elegant.  I’ve posted a question about this on the WordPress Stack Exchange, see:
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/66600/how-can-i-include-custom-category-and-tag-base-in-template-files

A new way to browse through the CLAS site has now become available. You can now search by the Seating Capacity of the lab. Labs have been categorized into increments of (5).

For example, a classroom has 33 computers. This would then be seen within the 1-35 group for Seating Capacity.

I made some changes to the syntax for permalinks (see: Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks).  In particular, I changed:

• “categories” to “specifications”
• “tags” to “software”
• /blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to /location/details/%postname%/

NOTE: I have updated the Settings > Privacy to not allow Google to index this site until we’ve decided on the best link syntax

We’re starting to add links to Google Maps which will show the walking directions to a given building.  See:
http://pages.charlotte.edu/labs/specifications/building/burson/