I got back from my vacation in the middle of last week and found myself busy again, needless to say.

Current projects, in no particular order:

• Finalizing daily automatic user creation: This is really close to done. The user creation script itself works just fine; all I need to do is go through the code and make sure I can turn off all output to the screen, because when you run something as a scheduled task (AKA crontab or “cron” job in the unix world) any output that would normally go to the screen instead gets emailed to the user under whose security privileges the job runs as. I can’t just redirect all output to null, because if there’s ever an error message, we need that email to notify us, so instead I need to make sure that all non-critical output is suppressed inside the script.
• Website master database: This is a big one, and I’ll be talking about it more in the next weeks. We’ve been planning for almost a year to redo our entire website, primarily to make it easier to maintain. It will be written in PHP and we’ll hide a lot of the common template features in external files. Anyone who views the source code of a WOU web page can see how complex our current template source is; this will be replaced by a few lines at the top and bottom of the file, with only the actual page content in between (still written in HTML so people don’t have to learn a whole new language.) These external files will query our Oracle database for some page-specific information, and right now I’m working on the administration utilities for that information.
• Detail work on the Calendar of Events: There are still a few things that need to be cleaned up; the event display needs a few tweaks, and I need to make the error messages friendlier.