This week was, to be honest quite crazy. All of the projects culminated this week, and it resulted in a huge lack of sleep. Fortunately, for our English project, everything finally started to come together. This week, we completely rewrote the "manage content" portion of the website in order to streamline the process of creating, editing, and deleting pages. With our original design, it would have proved impossible to add new sections to the site, once the initial design was finalized.

Week 16 Blog: The manage directory page has been fully implemented into the current website design. As it stands right now this will allow users to see the directory of the documents folder as new documents are uploaded to the server. This should fit in nicely with the other back-end features in the website. Not much progress was made on creating a download functionality to the manage documents link. This was due to other courses having similar final project deadlines this week.

After Thanksgiving Break with limited computer and internet access, we got back to work on the CFRC website. One of the first things I did was to continue working with the front end team to get the CSS designed for our website. While we had already started this the previous week, a lot of work remained to be done in order to fine tune it, make it compatible in multiple browsers, standards compliant, etc.

So this week we've been able to get everything uploaded and to the server, with the frontend people coding some basic HTML from a CSS-driven template created by Mark. From here they've started a basic homepage and have started creating some of the other sub-pages. I will have to go back and change several of the pages to reflect the dynamic content the admins enter from the portal, but I'm not worried about that.

Week 15 Blog: The manage directory page has started the development phase. This is based off the asp 101 webpage which contains the code that David showed me in class. This code can be sent images or file directories. This should be as easy as just setting the directory variable equal to the directory that houses the documents. Today in lab however, made it difficult to get any of this done so this will have to be completed sometime between now and Monday, which is when our testing begins. This will allow employees to post new documents to be viewed on the server.

For Week 14, I was finally able to begin most of the debugging. After the ridiculous delays caused by switching servers several times and not having an adequate testing server, I debugged the pages I had previously created. The jobs section of the website should be fully functional now, so that the admin can add, edit, or delete a job from the database. The "View Jobs" page is still functional and ready for the front-end team to take it away and add functionality such as JavaScript to hide jobs until a user clicks on it to expand the content.

Work has continued as usual, we have started a generic CSS-based template to work from, then we can always implement the front-end coder's work into ours and adapt the new layout. So far over break we have been able to merge the job applications and the manage content areas and will get the directory browsing running tomorrow, Thursday.

This week we have encountered a few problems. The largest problem we've encountered was that whenever we have an error on the server, it will not tell us what the error is, or what line the error has been detected. This has really slowed down the developmental progress, but we have been doing the best we can to write accurate code that will work.

Over the course of the last week, we had to deal with a vast array of problems. For starters, no error messages could be displayed on the new server that the client requested we design on, other than a generic error 500. In addition, due to weird Purdue security settings, we were not able to access the database on campus, and were forced to deal with it off campus. After getting frustrated with this and not hearing anything back from the client or service provider about the possibilities of fixing any of this, we moved the site back to its original location on David Auble's server.

I got sick this weekend, that's why this is late, but anyway, here's the progress we've made so far: we've set up the server in my apartment for testing purposes, but then we were informed to use the client's testing server. Once we got the FTP information, we set up the FTP, MSSQL database with tables and have started creating the framework for the backend. We have a secure login completed and have started the administrative portal, where depending on what type of account the user has, they will be able to do different things, such as upload files, post jobs or just view job postings.