The Contribute Publishing Server is down again. This is really frustrating; it was running great for months and then bam, two major failures since the beginning of February. Nobody can log in to the system at all.

Last time I had to reinstall the whole system and recreate all the site settings by hand (a tedious process for thirty sites) because when I tried restoring the backed-up settings the problem came right back. This time, even that doesn’t work; the problem occurs even on a totally fresh install with no sites defined.

I was able to demonstrate this to one of Adobe’s senior tech support engineers, and she confirmed this was a previously unknown program bug and submitted it to the CPS developers. They are supposed to get back to me within one business day, but it’s now been longer than that, so tomorrow morning it’s time to start pestering them again.

It’s frustrating because I still think this is a good product… at least it makes my job as an administrator much easier when it it working correctly. We’ll see how things go, I guess.

Things are rolling along. As you’ve no doubt noticed, more and more pages are going live with the new design. Things will slow down a bit as our student helpers have fewer hours to work, but you will keep seeing progress.

The next big issue is training the web editors in various departments to use the new system. The main differences from the old system are as follows:

1. You create new pages using a web form. The new system depends on PHP code to load in the external files that contain all the header and footer design elements, but we don’t want to force everybody to learn a new language. So we’ve designed a web form where you just input the title and location of the page, and some search engine keywords, and choose a side menu, and then hit submit; this creates the page and inserts all the necessary PHP code. From that point, you can edit the page without needing to know any PHP (or even any HTML, if you’re using Contribute.)
2. You need a special setup in Dreamweaver or Contribute to edit anything visually. If you are a code geek, you can use any text editor to change your webpage by editing the raw code, but most people probably aren’t that hard-core, even if they had the time on their hands to learn to code. You can use Macromedia Dreamweaver or Contribute to visually edit pages, though either one will require some initial setup by UCS (though we are working on making instructions available on the web and through the TRC.)
3. You need to be consistent with visual styles. The new system provides a menu of visual styles that look good with the new template. This makes it easy to add and update content and make it look nice; the flipside of this is that you won’t be able to use huge green blinking italics to highlight important information. (Note that personal sites on the P: drive are exempt from this; you can do whatever you want there.)
4. You are expected to keep your web pages up-to-date.In the old days, we were pretty lax about keeping everything updated, and requiring other departments to do the same on their own pages. Those days are done. With the new simplicity of Contribute, there is no excuse for pages to get stale. Most web editors will have responsibility for only a few pages, and tools to edit them easily, so you will be able to stay on top of things.

On top of all that, the biggest benefit of this massive update is that the next update will be much easier. We will be able to totally redesign the site without forcing everybody to update all their files all at once; since most of the design elements come from external files in a central location, we can just update those files and BAM! the whole site changes without you having to lift a finger. If we discover a problem with the new design, it will be easy to fix, unlike the previous template.
It will take us a lot of time and energy to get to that point, but the effort is already paying off. Once this is done, we’ll have a site that will make other universities green with envy. More to the point, it will show that WOU is not stuck behind the times, which will directly translate to higher enrollment, which benefits everybody here.

So, again I’ve been too busy to blog much. The web conversion project is moving along nicely, but is eating up almost all my time. If any of you are waiting on me to do something and I haven’t responded in some time, please feel free to bug me again. I know I’ve made some people wait too long for stuff; I apologize for that. Of course, these days we all know what it’s like to be understaffed; people have been understanding, for which I’m grateful.

Anyway, we’ve made major headway on phase one of the process, which is creating the rough-draft PHP files. I have five UCS students working on this, who all deserve mention for their hard work: Jonathan Guillen, Ronni Luchterhand, Mark Lyons, Michael Orr, and Courtney Wehner. Read on for more about the project…

The page creation system (AKA “websmith”) is just about ready to go. We’ve got a few people using it on a test basis already. In the new system you don’t create pages by copying an existing one; you go to websmith and enter in a few details like the page location, the title, the search engine keywords, and so on; you also get to choose which set of side links you want, and what basic template you want for the page. The page is then created for you in the location you specified. (Naturally, you can only create pages in a location you have X: drive access to; there’s no way anybody can break the whole site if they make a mistake.)
And tonight I’m working on the script to search out and change links in the whole website. This will be a vital part of phase two, where (after departments have given their approval) we move the HTML files in a given area into an archive folder, and make the PHP files into the real website.
We can’t do this all at once, naturally enough; it will go piece by piece, and will take months. But progress will be steady; you may have already seen the changes in the Admissions and Financial Aid pages, and many others of use to prospective students. More pages will be converted in the next weeks and months, until the entire site is converted. We hope to train people in each department to work on their own web pages in the new system, which will help things move faster.
Note that personal web pages in your P: drive (formerly known as public_html) will not be affected at all. As the process nears completion, we will offer help to anyone who wants to use the new system for their P: drive website, but nobody will be required to convert those pages.
If you have personal pages on the X: drive, we strongly encourage you to move them to the P: drive. Eventually, all pages on the X: drive should be in the new system; if you don’t want your personal pages converted, they will need to be moved to the P: drive. However, there’s no fixed deadline for this; we are avoiding personal folders that we find on the X: drive for now. When the time comes (probably several months from now), we will ask for your decision; if you want to move the pages to the P: drive, we will help you with that; if you don’t, we will help you convert them to the new system.
Anyway, that’s all for now. I have miles to go before I sleep, and I need to quit writing and get back to work.

Wow. Once again, it’s been a long time between entries, but this time I have a valid excuse. I’ve been working my tailbones off now that the website conversion has finally moved out of the preparation stages and into full swing!

The first stage involves creating new versions of pages on the WOU website. These new pages end in .php instead of .html or .htm, because they are written in the PHP language. You may be relieved to know that PHP can have HTML freely mixed in with it, so you won’t have to learn a new language to work with these pages.

These pages will eventually become the real pages on the website, but for now, the original HTML pages are still there and are not being changed. Each department will be able to look at the new PHP pages and approve or change them before we make them live, and the HTML pages will still be kept in an archive folder for reference, at least for the first while.

The first parts of the website to be fully converted will be the admissions process pages, in other words those that prospective students need to see during the admissions process. The home page will also be updated; you’ve seen its new look for months now, and that won’t change much, but we have a lot to do “under the hood”, so to speak.

Stay tuned for more info!

Well, at long last the much-delayed webserver move is done! Even aside from the benefits of the new storage hardware, the new server is going to make the webmastering part of my job much easier. I hope the rest of you enjoy having web drives that map without you needing to click an icon or remember a different password.

Anyway, now it’s time to go into high gear with the new template. The admissions pages will be the first to be converted; stay tuned for more on that. Meanwhile, I’ve got work to do if I want that done on time, so I’m going to go do it.

Well, as you know if you read your allfacstaff email, the webserver changeover has been postponed. This is essentially due to the administration’s need to be free to post updates instantaneously; even an 18-hour delay (at the most) is too much for news about the negotiations and looming strike.

Maybe after this mess blows over we’ll be able to get on with our jobs. I’m really having to bite my tongue about this whole strike business, at least in public like this; I feel stuck in the middle because I know people on both sides. It’s all really frustrating and demoralizing; as far as I can tell, neither side has malicious intent, yet people on both sides seem to feel that the other has some sort of evil hidden agenda, and is intentionally telling lies.

That’s all I’m going to say about that in public.

I’ve been busy today.

The URL redirects have been applied to www3.wou.edu, so you can test them on the new server. This means, for instance, that you can get to the Registrar’s website bu going to http://www3.wou.edu/registrar even though the real address of the site is http://www3.wou.edu/provost/registrar. There are 402 of these redirects on the server; someday I need to go in and try to figure out which are no longer used and delete them, but that will have to wait a while.

Also, secure folders should work. Any web pages that are password-protected on the current server are now also protected on the new one. Use the same username and password as on the current server; the only exception is if the username is the same as your WOU login. If so, you need to use your real WOU password, not the separate one you used for logging in to that webpage.

The new server gives us some new options for secure folders, by the way; we’ll be able to specify “any WOU user”, for instance, or have people log in with their normal WOU usernames and passwords.

And I’m still plugging away on the editing permissions script; I’m guessing that will be ready by the end of the week.

Oops, I made a mistake in my last entry; the W: drive isn’t going to be coming back after the migration. After the final file copy and setting of permissions, the X: drive will be the one to use. Mac users will connect to smb://sundown/wou_website$.

Despite how everybody commonly talks about it, the W: drive is not actually the location where the website files are stored. Really it’s just a shortcut that leads to the real location. From your end, it looks like any other drive attached to your computer, but it is just a shortcut to a specific network location. That location is currently on the old server, which is why we can’t automatically map the W: drive on your somputer now (To “map a drive” means to set up that shortcut so the drive letter or icon points to the proper network location.) This is also why you have to enter your old password when you run that pesky little batch file to map the W: drive (or when Mac users connect to “/maverick_nt/wou_website$”.)

Since the W: drive (and any other network drive letter or Mac network drive icon) is really just a shortcut, it can be different for different people. A good example of this is your H: drive; it points to a different place for every person, namely their private network folder. Conversely, some people use different drive letters to point to the same location; for instance, at least one person I know of has a Z: drive on their computer that points to the web server files, so for them it’s exactly the same as the W: drive. Mostly we try to keep things standardized here so everybody uses the same letters for the same things, just to keep confusion down. Mac people don’t have this extra level of complexity since Mac’s don’t use drive letters; you just see a named icon, though that’s still actually a shortcut.
Why all this explanation, you may ask? Why do we need to care that the W: drive isn’t actually the location that holds the files? Because what I’m about to say won’t make sense without the concept that drive letters and icons are actually just shortcuts that can be mapped to different locations.
Here’s the process: First, we copied the web data from the old server to the new server. All of your W: drives still map to the old location, as does the web address wou.edu. (If it helps, you can think of a web address as just another kind of drive letter that happens to be visible in web browsers instead of in your “My Computer” folder; it’s a shortcut that points someplace, and the place it points to can be changed.) If you have edits to make, you should continue to make them through the W: drive; the copy we made is just a temporary one anyway.
Once we get the editing permissions figured out, we’ll apply them to the temporary copy of the files. We’ll create an X: drive for everybody that points to that temporary copy, so you can test that your editing permissions still work. You can view those test changes at www3.wou.edu, which is a temporary web address. You still want to make real updates to the W: drive, though, because the web address wou.edu still points there, and so that’s what people see on the live website. With me so far?
After everyone has had a chance to test their permissions on the temporary files, and we fix any problems we found in the process, we’ll delete the temporary copy of the files, and remove the X: drive. Then we’ll do the actual web migration. At this point you need to hold off on making any web edits until informed that the migration is complete. We will copy the files from the old server again, including any changes you made up until that moment. That took about fifteen hours when we did the test copy, so you can count on it taking about that long with the real thing. When that’s done, we’ll run the permissions script to reset everybody’s editing rights, and change the wou.edu address so it points to the new server, and set up an automatic mapping of the W: drive to the new server. All this should take less than a day, including the file copying.
Once this is done, you can throw out those drive-mapping batch files; they won’t work anymore because the W: drive will be mapped automatically at the time of login, if you have any web rights. From your point of view, things will look pretty much the same as they did before; you will still go to wou.edu to get to the website, and use the W: drive to edit your files. It’s just that both of these shortcuts will be pointing to the new server instead of the old one.