Week Four

This week has been somewhat quieter in the office due to various members of the team working else where or being on annual leave at different times of the week, and I’ve largely been working on my own on outstanding tasks for the Project Showcase project, and also some work on the Floorplan Map Viewer project.

I have been taking time getting to grips with Drupal. Drupal is admittedly a platform with a difficult learning curve, and its reliance on 3rd party modules for much of its functionality can be frustrating, this is made up for by Drupal being a very power platform to develop on once you have gotten to grips with it. The Drush utility makes developing for Drupal considerably easier by providing a straightforward way of managing modules within a project. For the tasks I have been working on this week I’ve needed to often test out several modules, one after the other, in order to find a module which provides the best solution to the problem I’m trying to solve or which provides the functionality required in order to implement a desired feature. For example, I have used the Relation and Relation edit modules to implement many-to-many relationships between content types (Drupal’s name for data classes within a website), and at the time of writing I’m investigating the use of the Search API module for providing better and more detailed search tools for the website. One part of Drupal I have found consistently useful is the Features module, which allows the user to save elements of a Drupal website and the required dependencies for those elements into self contained packages (‘features’) which can be saved to files and exchanged between Drupal installs. This has helped simplify the process of version control for the project considerably, with the features and some setup scripts written by Kevin Puplett being added to the project Git at opposed to the entire Drupal directory.

Front page of Drupal site in development, using Southampton theming and with the admin toolbar visible at the top.

The work I’ve done on the Floorplan Map Viewer has involved fixing outstanding issues with the code in order to get the demonstration application functioning before next week, when I will be spending the entirety of the week extending on this demo. When I last worked on the demo I was experiencing a frustrating error where the latitude of my points were being flipped horizontally within the building. I discovered this was due to an error in one of my data sets. I also attempted to extend the demo to be able to display both the floorplan maps for floor four and floor five of Guildhall Square One as separate layers, functionality offered by Leaflet.js.

The leaflet.js demo, with the desk plan of floor four of GS1 shown.