Politarchopolis Hierophant

Matters arising from the baronial meeting, in no particular order:

• The “Visual” mode for editing blog entries is a bit flakey at times. See if I can find a plugin that works better than the default.
• Upgrade WordPress to the latest version.
• Meetings this year will be at the School of Music. Get a map, and pop in to take photos so we can show people where to go, because the levels and floors of the SoM are as insane as the people running the place.
• Extra field for officers table: link to their blog
• Allow non-officers to have entries in the officers table; make that the standard way to contact stewards and bookings people.
• Contact all the officers to ensure the addresses are right.
• Automate the process of contacting officers, so I can do it by typing a password and clicking Send.
• Get permission from officers to publish their email addresses on the site.
• Ditto for publishing addresses in Griffintayle.
• Come up with a better way to do the web-vs-emailed Griffintayle, so Thanatos doesn’t have to do two copies each time.
• There’s an event, presumably either Valhalla or Casual War, at Warrambui on November 20-23 or thereabouts.
• The March baronial meeting will be the first Wednesday of April; after that it goes back to every last Wednesday.
• Add the ability to “move” dates in the exceptions section of an event specification.
• Talk to other web ministers about calendar coordination. Ideal solution: everyone maintains their own calendars the same way, but they can all be viewed from a central location. Work on a good spec; figure out how to deal with web ministers who don’t know how to program (ie the ones who aren’t qualified to do the job).
• Blog for College Seneschal.
• Blog for Captain of Archers.
• Blog for Herald.

… Plus the stuff from my previous entry. Busy Sunday!

The changed site is uploaded and live! And I sent an actual real live officer’s report to my kingdom superior! Gods I’m good!

Still to do:

• Add in some more events - now a much easier job! They’re all there now, although frequently without much in the way of details.
• New: Tell it not to display events that have already happened!
• Do the same database-to-XML conversion for the last remaining table, the officers list. I’ve already got the XML; just have to change the script that lists the officers.
• Delete the now-redundant database tables.
• Chase up Baroness Leta (again!) to get award information.
• And that’s all! Anything else can wait until people actually ask for it.

Very close to finishing the events code and uploading it.  It needs only two things: the main events page that lists all the upcoming events, and some editing of the actual events to include some details that weren’t included in the original database.  However, family matters took precedence today and, while I got a fair bit done, it’s not ready for upload yet.

So: tomorrow, possibly on the bus to work, I’ll forego watching the latest Torchwood and instead add the missing bits.  I’ll upload the lot as soon as I can, including the latest Griffintayle.  And  then, with that all sorted and some actual achievements under my belt, I’ll send my first actual proper officer’s report to the kingdom web minister, CCing the seneschal.

But that’s tomorrow (well, later today really…).  Right now, I have important sleeping to do.

The code to handle events is looking pretty good now.  I’ve got it fitting events into the calendar properly, just the way it used to do with the database-backed version, only now it’s reading the events from XML files and allowing for many more options.  Looking at my recent wishlist entry-cum-specification, I can report that events can now be specified with date exceptions, the summary and description now allow HTML, the times and prices can be specified in detail, and the embedded Google Maps work perfectly.  The only thing left is the booking details, which will also require a carefully-crafted “Politarchopolan Bookings Policy”, which I’ll write based on the Lionheart Company policy and run past the Seneschal for approval before it goes live.

So: although the site seems not to have changed much in the last two weeks, I have very definitely been putting in my hour a week and then some (more like a dozen hours this week and about the same last week) and it’s all about to bear fruit.

Now… where’s that deputy with her content updates?  I shall have to get her working on putting all the existing events in this new format…