STA Blog

Leroy James

Hebrew Drupal Site

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Project: Hebrew Language Site

Completion Status: 80%

Staff Guidance: Ryan

Descriptions/Plans:

Cleaning up a Drupal site forDr. Raizen before it launches. Luckily, there isn’t a lot of crazy updates or anything too ugly to clean, just some light editing. While it is entirely Drupal based, I must say Drupal isn’t too hard to grasp, just different, especially if you’re use to WordPress.STA WikiWikiWiki image

Mail Chimp!

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Project: Mail Chimp!

Completion Status: Just started

Staff Guidance: Andre

Descriptions/Plans:

Cascade is getting an update! To warn/inform the professors who use it, we’re gonna be designing a newsletter letting everyone know of the various changes that’ll be happening. The aim is to make it so that 1) people are more excited to use the new Cascade and update their sites more often, and 2) create a really nice newsletter that’ll get some regular use by LAITS for the future.

Me and Chu-Wei will be designing these in Mail Chimp, a program/website none of us are too familar with, but it looks like it might be simple enough to use.

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Canvas

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Project: Canvas Pilot

Completion Status: 100%

Staff Guidance: n/a

Descriptions/Plans:

Learn Canvas! So, UT looks to be piloting something similar to Blackboard, only it should allow instructors to record video, and have their students respond with videos as well. Or audio in some cases. Over the last two weeks I took a few hours to learn how to use and navigate Canvas for Professor De Martinez. It’s definitely a cool program and am curious to see if I’ll run into it in the future as a student. It was also great to get and teach someone, one on one, how to use a piece of web software that I was also new to.STA WikiWikiWiki image

What Jane Saw

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Project: What Jane Saw

Completion Status: _()_/

Staff Guidance: Everyone! (mostly Ryan)

Descriptions/Plans:

Helping out to finish the WJS site. As I understand it’s been two years in the making and we’re reaching the end of it finally. Sort of a nice break to get away from WP and coding to work with just straight PHP and Photoshop. My wall/contribution can be found here: click me

Here’s hoping I can do a few more walls in the future. STA WikiWikiWiki image

Custom CSS Plugin

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Project: Custom CSS plugin for Conferences site

Completion Status: 95%

Staff Guidance: Stacy

Descriptions/Plans:

Now that a theme was created for the Conferenes site, we had only one problem to address; what to do about the CSS. While someone might be able to go in and edit the CSS for their site the downside is, they’d be editing the theme’s CSS and thus editing it for every site! So, like any problem in WordPress, you either find or create a plugin to solve it.
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With Stacy’s help, I was able to create a plugin that allows a user to edit the CSS for their site, without affecting the original theme’s CSS. So, many people can use the same theme, adjust what they need to, and not worry about editing someone else’s code.
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Eventually, once I create a variable that’ll allow someone who doesn’t have Genesis installed to use it, it’ll be released into the wild.

Conferences WordPress Theme

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Project: A custom Conferences WordPress Theme

Completion Status: 90% done

Staff Guidance: Stacy

Descriptions/Plans:

Over the winter break, I got to create a custom theme for the Conferenes site for UT. The purpose of the theme is to have a great looking site for all of the UT Conferences to use, while still be able to easily edit and use for any user, even if they don’t know one thing about WordPress. The theme was created using the Genesis framework. Below is the wireframe for the theme.

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I then, with Stacy’s help, established where to put the widgetized areas and implemented them for the homepage.

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Now the theme is live and reading to go, you can see it here:http://conferences.la.utexas.edu/theme/

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