Dwees Design

As you know, a colleague and I are working on our new school website. This part of a series of blog posts explaining what we have done.

The very first task we did was to look at the information we were provided on the needs of the school in terms of menu layout and functionality. This was actually fairly easily done since we had spent the previous year working in a committee. From this, we decided on a menu structure and overall plan for our site.

Our idea is to segment the site using Organic Groups, largely because it's easy to create access control (just assign users to the groups they are allowed to view) and easy to maintain relationships between the content of the site and it's location within the site. We are also planning on using the Panels module to provide the display of the group nodes and the front page.

We plan on using the Views module to expose our site information, and using custom content types to make it easier for users to submit information for display within the correct view. We may end up using CCK to add some fields to our nodes, particularly for our Alumni users to submit user profiles and for our school bulletin items.

The site is already starting to come together a bit, which is exciting.

David

I'm going to be working with a partner to create a Drupal site for my school. We have a full month to work on the main details of the site, and will work on improving it over the course of the whole year.

The idea is that we want to build a site which will serve as a marketing front-end for the school, and as an way to distribute information to parents and students from the school, and allow teachers to collaborate with each other and their students.

I know that Drupal can do the job. I plan on using this blog to document my process.

Today we started by setting up 2 domains for us to use, one as a back-up to the other, and installing a mirrored Drupal installation on both of them. Plan is to start with a huge bundle of modules (most of which will never be enabled) to remind ourselves of all of the features available to us through the active community at Drupal.org. We don't want to build anything from scratch that exists already.

The major difficulty with the site will be in the intended upgrades. We want to eventually have parents able to monitor their child's progress through their account on the website. So we have a lot of sensitive information that we need to protect, which means access control is going to have to be carefully checked.

What this script does it allow the user to enter their text into a box, and when they click submit, it sends the information via Ajax to a server side script that processes the information and creates an animated gif from the information. The server side script (written in PHP) then sends back the location of the image, and the client side JavaScript updates the page with the image.

It doesn't have any features really, but it should pretty easy to add some.

Here is the link to the original post

See the download link at the bottom of this page.

So I've created a script which takes some user input, and lets them search for all of the words in either the TWL06 or SOWPODS dictionary for words which match their input.

Some features:

1. The order that the user enters the letters doesn't matter.
2. The user can specify the exact location of some of the letters in the word
3. The user can use up to two wildcards in the letters (to represent blanks).

I'd like to try some ways to minimize the memory required to do this, it's possible that I need to read each line of the file at a time, and close the file after I've done so, so that I can search through a larger file (there are 2 other dictionaries I'd like to include, but they push PHP over the limit in terms of memory).

Check out my Scrabble cheater here.

If you drag point C left or right, you can see the point D travel in a spiral shape.

Please install Java 1.4 (or later) to use this page.