Next generation of my site - questions

[Don Chambers]

Hello again everyone! Hope you have all had a great 2006! Perhaps some of you will remember the boating event site I created with s9y last year - many of you were very helpful!!! The site is http://www.chicagoloopcruise.com/

Anyway, that site was first built with MS FrontPage. I then changed the index page to s9y, but everything else was still FrontPage, which requires FrontPage extensions.

I may re-do everything graphically, not sure yet, but if I totally overhaul, then I would like to convert the rest of the site to s9y.

1) Looks like I need to upgrade first. Can I just copy the files to my server and that will complete the upgrade?

2) Found the contact form - even installed the plugin. Looks like that will work OK.

http://www.chicagoloopcruise.com/index. ... tform.html

3) Am I correct in assuming the balance of what I need to do is to use "static pages" for the other pages of my site?

4) My event registration form (http://www.chicagoloopcruise.com/2006-c ... ration.htm) looks like the biggest hurdle. I need to add some fields over what I currently have, but can I do something like this with s9y? I skimmed over some other CMS's and saw one (e107 I think) that had a nifty contact like plugin. In that, you could define as many fields as you wanted, specify type (text, numeric, boolean, etc), and whether or not it was required. The form was then generated from that information. I think it wrote that information to a database, and perhaps that is a limitation here, but is there a way to accomplish this in s9y? My programming skills are virtually non-existent, but I am a fairly fast learner....

Anyway, its been a long time since I have been on this site, but it is good to be back. I realize my use of s9y for this annual event is not what s9y was created to do, but it worked really well last year and I would like to take it to the next step - any and all help, comments, recommendations will be appreciated.

[yellowled]

1) Looks like I need to upgrade first. Can I just copy the files to my server and that will complete the upgrade?

http://www.s9y.org/37.html

3) Am I correct in assuming the balance of what I need to do is to use "static pages" for the other pages of my site?

Well, if their content is rather static, that's probably the best approach, especially if you want to use s9y's admin panel to edit these pages. And if I understand your final comment on using s9y for this right, you do want to use it, which is perfectly reasonable - it saves a lot of coding

4) My event registration form (http://www.chicagoloopcruise.com/2006-c ... ration.htm) looks like the biggest hurdle. I need to add some fields over what I currently have, but can I do something like this with s9y?

Matt Groeninger has just extended the contact form plugin to be able to use additional fields as far as I've read - however, I'm not sure whether this is powerful enough to emulate your form, especially with the disclaimer ...

Hope that helped a little,
YL

[carl_galloway]

Yellowled is correct about the new contact form, which BTW is currently avail from Spartacus. You certainly can use it for all the fields you mention, but at present it will email the details to you. If you get stuck with working out how to change the form then PM me and I'll happily send you back the intructions on how to configure the dynamic part of the contact form.

As for saving the completed contact form to the database, it can be done, but it requires editing the plugin to do that instead of emailing you. If you really want to go down this road, perhaps for safer handling of credit card numbers etc, then one of the developers is going to need to help you out. Not sure how willing mgroeninger would be since he's exceptionally busy at present but a request in the plugins forum might get a response from someone.

[Don Chambers]

1) Looks like I need to upgrade first. Can I just copy the files to my server and that will complete the upgrade?

http://www.s9y.org/37.html

This is where I get a bit confused regarding updating:

Code: Select all

---
 .htaccess
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Authorisation: Serendipity Upgrade IN PROGRESS"
AuthUserFile /absolute/path/to/your/s9y/.htpasswd
require valid-user
---

Then create a file .htpasswd using a simple 'username:md5password' combination. Look at http://www.advancehost.com/htpasswd.html for an online generator for .htpasswd files.

---
.htpasswd
s9y:s9QXoc9dcFOT2
---

This would create a user "s9y" with password "s9y" with which you'd have to log into your blog.

As far as the new contact plugin - I just added that and will play around with it for a bit. One question comes immediatly to mind - can I use this single plugin to have 2 different forms - one for use as a genuine contact form, and another for a "registration" form? Would I need to install the plugin twice, if that is even possible??

[yellowled]

This is where I get a bit confused regarding updating:

Can't remember ever having done something like that ... I'd wait for a word from Garvin, but if your current version isn't a very ancient one, the automated upgrade should work.

One question comes immediatly to mind - can I use this single plugin to have 2 different forms - one for use as a genuine contact form, and another for a "registration" form? Would I need to install the plugin twice, if that is even possible??

As far as I know: Yes, it is possible, and yes, you would need to install it twice for two seperate forms. However, I have to admit I never tried it with the contactform plugin. As long as each contactform is assigned an individual URL, this should work, I think

YL

[Don Chambers]

Thanks for your suggestions YL - much appreciated! Hoping Garvin will chime in here soon!!!! If he does not, will try some of what you and Carl have suggested. Thank you again! You too Carl!!!

[Don Chambers]

Hey Garvin or anyone else - any input on:

a) my stated confusion regarding the .htaccess bit in the upgrade notes? My situation is a bit precarious at the moment as I am still using MS Frontpage. I have to transfer everything to the shared server via FrontPage - not FTP, so this is a concern.

b) multiple uses of the contact form... might just wing this one and see if it works.


Meanwhile, there is one very challenging obstacle I see on the horizon. As a reminder, my site is dedicated to an annual boating event. It happens only once per year, then sits idle for months. However, once registration for the current event opens, I begin to track the participants. Since their registration is nothing more than an email to me, I am manually adding this information to a MS Excel spreadsheet. I wish it could be complied into a database at time of entry, but I have no clue how to do that, and the spreadsheet allows me to track much more information about attendees.

In the past, using MS Frontpage, I simply copied the appropriate columns and rows and pasted them into FrontPage. FrontPage then generated the appropriate looking page. Here is what it looked like last year:

http://www.chicagoloopcruise.com/2006-c ... endees.htm

Any ideas of how to easily get my Excel data into s9y (presumably a static page)? I tried copy & paste to MS Word, then viewed the HTML source from that, and pasted it into s9y, but the HTML baggage that comes from that route is awful.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

The .htaccess upgrade note only applies when you want to block access to your blog during upgrade. If you worry about it, don't modify the .htaccess and just resume the other usual operations.

However I really have no experience with Frontpage and how it might screw up things. Transfering via FrontPage is definitely a very uncool thing to do, because it drops folders around the s9y directory structure that screw up the s9y plugin API.

b) multiple uses of the contact form... might just wing this one and see if it works.

It should work.

I wish it could be complied into a database at time of entry, but I have no clue how to do that, and the spreadsheet allows me to track much more information about attendees.

This would work when you create your own serendipity plugin, based on the contact form but just with a DB input instead of EMail output. However I see you're not that skilled with PHP, so I suppose you would need to hire someone like Matthew to do that trick for you?

HTH,
Garvin

[Don Chambers]

Thanks for the input on the upgrade - need to back everything up, then will give it a shot.

Getting the data to a DB isn't a huge priority... nice to have, but not mandatory.

What I was hoping someone would have a tip on was an easy way to cut & paste a MS Excel worksheet into a static page..... Ideally, what I need is something that will strip away all the Excel formatting (except maybe the borders), leaving behind just the table, tr's & td's I think.... Ideas????

[yellowled]

What I was hoping someone would have a tip on was an easy way to cut & paste a MS Excel worksheet into a static page..... Ideally, what I need is something that will strip away all the Excel formatting (except maybe the borders), leaving behind just the table, tr's & td's I think.... Ideas????

I've never really used Excel, but as far as I know it can export tables as CSV (comma seperated values) ... and that was possible a looong time ago, maybe it can export to HTML now? Just an idea ...

YL

[Don Chambers]

OK - I found a solution (sort of) for generating a "table" from my Excel worksheet and getting it into a static page. Only one final problem to overcome.

I also wanted it to be a little cleaner, so I have been reading up on CSS when I can, and seem to have something working.

The first part of my static page includes some intro text and sets up the "column headers" as that portion is always fixed.

My Excel worksheet contains tabluar data... attendee names, location, headcount, and other attendee specifics.

Basically, for a given "row", I concatenate all the relevant data into a single Excel cell. That concatenation includes the <div> codes and such which reference css styles. In other words, my Excel formula looks something like this:

Code: Select all

=CONCATENATE("<div class='static_page_attendee_cell static_page_attendee_col1'>",A81, "</div>
<div class='static_page_attendee_cell static_page_attendee_col2'>",B81,"</div>
<div class='static_page_attendee_cell static_page_attendee_col3'>",D81,"</div>
<div class='static_page_attendee_cell static_page_attendee_col4'>",F81,"</div>
<div class='static_page_attendee_cell static_page_attendee_col5'>",G81,"</div>")

That, in turn, returns the following for every "row" in my "table", which is a simple cut & paste into the static page:

Code: Select all

"<div class='static_page_attendee_cell static_page_attendee_col1'>Smith, John & Mary</div>
<div class='static_page_attendee_cell static_page_attendee_col2'>New Town, IL</div>
<div class='static_page_attendee_cell static_page_attendee_col3'>2</div>
<div class='static_page_attendee_cell static_page_attendee_col4'>We Love Our Boat</div><div class='static_page_attendee_cell static_page_attendee_col5'>Bryant 192 limited</div>"

The CSS looks like this:

Code: Select all

.static_page_container {
width: 100%;
padding: 0px;
margin: 0px auto;
font-size: 8pt;
}

.static_page_spacer {
clear: both;
}

.static_page_attendee_col_titles {
background: black none repeat scroll 0%;
text-align: center;
font-weight: bold;
}

.static_page_attendee_cell {
border-style: solid;
border-width: 0.5px;
border-color: rgb(0, 0, 255);
float:left;
height: 30px;
padding-left: 5px;
padding-right: 5px;
}

.static_page_attendee_col1 {
width: 130px;
}

.static_page_attendee_col2 {
width: 94px;
}

.static_page_attendee_col3 {
width: 40px;
text-align: center;
}

.static_page_attendee_col4 {
width: 110px;
font-style: italic;
}

.static_page_attendee_col5 {
width: 102px;
}

The only problem resulting from this is that my Excel concatenation produces a value that begins and ends in quotes. When viewing the actual result in Excel, the cell does not show those quotes, but when copying and pasting the result elsewhere, the quotes appear.

I realize this has nothing to do with s9y, but does anyone know why my formula results have quotes?

Also, since I know little about css, my solution may be less than optimum, so feel free to comment on that as well.

[Don Chambers]

Found my problem with quotes resulting from my Excel concatenation formula! When I originally wrote the formula, I was copying the class info from an example I commented into my static page. That example had code on 2 separate lines like this:

Code: Select all

</div>
<div class="whatever_class">

When I copied it into the formula, the line break was preserved between the lines. The only visual indication of this was a little square between the </div> and <div class="....> for each of my "columns" until the end of the "row". When copied and pasted into my static page, it was treated something like a paragraph enclosed inside of quotes. I removed the hidden break/line feed and the quote problem disappeared. I'm only pointing this out incase anyone ever wanted to try something similar.

Anyway, I still have to clean it up a bit, and my styling probably looks shoddy compared to you experts, but I am fairly excited that I was able to turn an inflexible MS FrontPage generated page and table of this: http://www.chicagoloopcruise.com/2006-c ... endees.htm

Into an s9y static page of this: http://www.chicagoloopcruise.com/index. ... ndees.html

I'm well on my way to giving FrontPage the boot, and switching over to nothing but s9y for this entire site! I have converted several other of my FrontPage pages to s9y static pages, but they are not in my page links just yet. It is amazing how much cleaner everything is when I view the source, especially when I replace FrontPage tables with <divs>. Here is one (still need to replace the table with divs) using a trick I have been using elsewhere that gives a single static page the illusion of multiple headlines, albeit without a corresponding hyperlink, which I really do not need.

Old created with MS FrontPage: http://www.chicagoloopcruise.com/2006-c ... istics.htm

New - s9y static page: http://www.chicagoloopcruise.com/index. ... stics.html

Not sure how long all these links above will remain active as I am tearing into stuff all over the place. Regardless, just thought I would share this stuff even if it is nothing like what s9y is normally used for.

ALSO - this stuff is all working just fine in Firefox, but not IE... so I suppose I am going to need to dig into why IE is, once again, a PITA.

[Don Chambers]

Having patted myself on the back for a job well done, I discovered that several of my pages simply did not work in MS IE6.... Most of the problems seem to come from what I have read about buggy float and clear issues with IE. By trial and error, I seemed to have resolved them on the page giving me the most headaches.

FrontPage generated page: http://www.chicagoloopcruise.com/index. ... ndees.html

s9y static page, hopefully working in browsers other than FireFox: http://www.chicagoloopcruise.com/index. ... ndees.html

Some very surprising things I discovered while trying to clean up the page which displayed perfectly with Firefox, but required some game playing with IE:

IE did not like a border width of 0.5px.... would not display my border until I changed it to 1.0px, which then required a resizing of my "column" divs.

The contents of some "cells" in my table include a quoted word... which seemed to supress wrapping the text to the next line, and instead caused IE to stretch that particular box.

IE is not a fan of comments within comments.

There were other issues, but I'm brain dead right now.

Well, I have enjoyed this little conversation with myself this weekend! I'm sure I'll be back when I encounter the next problem, which is sure to occur within moments of the next time I try to convert some of my remaining MS FrontPage junk!

[Arnold Nijboer]

hey owen stubbs

just a short repley on that fronpage issue,
i've had some problems with it just read the following topic
http://www.s9y.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7738
garvin was again a great help.

Good Luck
Arnold

[Don Chambers]

Thanks Arnold - I just posted a reply to you there regarding FP.

One huge improvement as I convert my FP pages to s9y static pages, inserting divs and css where possible, is the reduction in file size. The one page I have been referring to in this thread was reduced from 485k in size to about 72k.... that is something like an 85% reduction in size, which has obvious implications from a speed perspective.