May 12, 2004

Breaking things up

  • Got good responses back about page length. Apparently, Best Practices says that less than three screenfulls is as much as you want on one page. If there's more than that then breaking it up helps instill an implicit organization to the information.
  • The Yale Web Style Guide
Posted by Mighty at 02:35 AM

May 11, 2004

Shifting things around

  • What's currently under the Signin button is going to move to Account Info
  • Gonna play with menu colors
  • Tried red. The top and bottom buttons use the same backgrounds, so they're red, also. Don't think I like that. I guess I should split those into their own backgrounds. Though I hate duplicating
  • Want to shift the flyouts down a coupla pixels. That offset bugs me
  • Posted a question on the P7 group asking for advice on page length
Posted by Mighty at 01:27 AM

May 07, 2004

Authentication continues

  • Typed up an email to CGI-World asking a few things
    • First, told them that my host is not where the live site will be, so he can abandon his research into why Mozilla is getting intermittent 403s in the admin area
    • Asked how a user can log out of a session
    • Essentially asked for permission to ignore the license agreement and make small mods to the scripts myself
    • The first mod is to not show non-viewable fields to users on sign-up
    • Suggested that they might want to add a mention in the manual that their customers should probably add a .htaccess file to the password_manager directory, to keep people from browsing down to the data files
Posted by Mighty at 07:33 PM

May 06, 2004

Digging into authentication

  • Still can't get it to fail with IE.
  • Sent question to CGI-World and got a response back in about 10 mins. That rocks
  • Checked pm into version control
  • Experimenting to see if I can call the .cgi from within my html file
  • Okay. I can do that. But it's not a complete solution. It works for subscribing and signing in to view account info. But the actual view info and change info screens go straight to the .cgi and have to use the plain templates. So the menus and buttons disappear. I figure that would be disorienting.
  • I added a little mod to not show non-viewable fields in the signup form. Seems to work. I might leave it.
  • Typing up instructions so dad can have a first look at it
  • Wishlist item: when editing users, have a button that updates the user, approves him, and moves to the next user waiting for approval.
Posted by Mighty at 03:53 PM

May 05, 2004

Installing Password Manager

  • Looks straightforward so far
  • Went in smoothly. Looks like everyone's going to be in one group.
  • It's a little flakey. Sometimes it takes two or three tries before it authorizes me to change a customer or a group.
  • For some reason, everytime I go into the customer edit screen it changes the login ID to Mighty.
  • It works in IE
  • Apparently, the password-filler in Mozilla was intruding. I went into the password manager and deleted all the relavent passwords stored below mightydrake.com/JCI and that appears to have cleared it up
  • That also appears to have cleared up the intermittent failed authorization
  • Tomorrow, I think I'm going to play with the template files. Then I'll point dad at it and see what he thinks
  • Someday soon I should install Apache on here, so I can set up a test site with root-relative paths to my includes, images, etc
  • Nope. Failed authorization still here in Mozilla. Need to try IE for awhile tomorrow
  • New tasks to finish out authentication:
    • List of emails to notify of new user
    • Edit required fields
    • Don't display expiration date nor extra fields in user sign-up
    • Automagically gonculate subscription length based on expiration date
    • Remove sub-groups?
    • Track down Mozilla authorization problem
Posted by Mighty at 12:20 PM

May 03, 2004

Let's do some little stuff

  • Asked for authorization to order CGI-World's product
  • Gonna work on stuff like finding a place for the signin button, make sure I have the PDFs for download, etc
  • Turns out they're all in one PDF file. I don't have Adobe Distiller here to split them out on my own
  • Let's put the sign-in button on there, just to get the placement correct
  • Let's go ahead and rough up my 404 and 401 pages
  • Spent about an hour on server-side replacement strings. Turns out, that's not handled in preview mode
  • Both of those pages finished. Changing .htaccess to use them
  • Hmm. Because the 401 is redirecting from inside a protected directory, I think it's not finding any of the images, etc. I'll have to try to find out how to handle that
  • Ah, no. I was going to .../MenuTest/customers. That's up one level too high, and my relative paths to includes don't work. When I put a trailing slash on there it worked. Also, when I followed the customer quotations link it worked.
Posted by Mighty at 04:06 PM

May 01, 2004

Questions answered

  • Got a response on my NN4 positioning question. Turns out I was careless and didn't notice that the logo was out of position a little, and not the buttons. So they suggested I put the logo in a div. That also has a pleasant side effect of not putting such a big gap between the logo and the content in NN4.
  • Only got one response back on my authentication question in the P7 forum. The guy was pointing me at a "simple" DW extension. I need the entire package, so that's not going to be appropriate.
  • Got a response back from CGI-World. It sounds like they concur with my assessment
  • Didn't hear back from dad, though, on the feature list I sent
Posted by Mighty at 07:04 AM