This is a post I wanted to write up for a couple of weeks now, describing the dotText project I was fortunate enough to recently complete on a freelance basis for Educause, located in Boulder, Colorado. I wasn't going to take on this project, but I immediately liked the project manager Matt Pasiewicz from our correspondences. I also knew I was an idiot if I passed on this opportunity to spend some quality time with dotText. Matt knew exactly what he wanted and was a fantastic manager.
I delayed talking about this project because I wanted to adequately describe the cool dotText mods we did over the course of two months of latenight fun. But I thought, screw it, I'll just try to list what we did and if I can elaborate on the details at some point I will.
Here is the link to the Educause Community Blogs. Definitely check it out. Below is a list of dotText mods we did on the site, some of which I will be elaborating on in my Code Camp III talk.
- Removed Gallery and Article Admin tabs
- Added Cookie-based Comment support. The comment form appears only when user authenticated
- Established relationship from all bloggers and commenters to their remotely stored Educause identities
- Post count totals and RSS Syndication links to home page blogger list
- Shared Categories used by all bloggers across all blogs
- Administrative filtering function for each blogger to use subset of all Shared Categories as needed
- Shared Categories display on home page sidebar with total post counts and RSS support
- Display of all posts by Shared Category, formatted like home page recent posts by author
- Full podcasting support. File Upload admin component. Replace and physically remove attachment file functions
- Attachment link to all post displays in all pages
- Bloggers by Group display, with post counts and RSS support by individual and by group
- Shared Categor(ies) and personal categor(ies) displayed with all posts on all pages
- Separate podcast feed
- FreeTextBox upgrade to FTB 3.0. FTB 3.0 bugs required an upgrade to FTB 2.0 instead
- Calendar control for all users
- Metablog API bug fixes on EditPost and to add User ID to blog_content record
- Recent Comments sideparts on aggregated and individual pages
- Recent Posts sideparts on aggregated and individual pages
- Automatic Mimetype assignment update to File Upload component, removing requirement to select filetype from dropdown in admin upload file control
- Turned off keyword transforms in comments
- Added default button function to execute on [enter] on the admin login page
- Admin Preferences Settings fix so changes take affect on postback
- Lucene searching added from 0.96 source. Exact phrase, boolean, and wildcard support, and in combination. Added multiple field indexing support
- Customized search output to include shared and personal categories
Being able to do this project might not make me married-to-Jessica-Rabbit kind of lucky, but as nerd luck goes, it makes me one very lucky rabbit!