Our group study in web design at Haverford High School is going along fine. Last week we finished up learning PHP with database driven websites. All of the participants made their own "user registration" site. These sites had a register page, a list of users, ability to edit or delete a user, and the ability to log in and log off with session cookies. In addition, each participant customized their site using their knowledge of CSS to their favorite colors and fonts.

Mid-Term Presentations

Last Friday, we gave presentations to our sponsors in the school technology department showing off what we had been working on. Shawn Ard started off by talking about phpMyAdmin and showing off his own personal "Articus" user registration page he had been working on in his free time. Gary Hunt showed off his user's site and talked about it's use of a MySQL database. Sean Maguire showed off his email sending script and his tip calculator he made a few weeks before. Michael Gdovin used his time to show the "black hat" skills he learned with an "email spam" page and a page which would crash the browser when loaded. Michael Plasmeier, group leader, showed off his plans and design for the SeniorQuoter admin site.

Assigning Jobs

This week the participants started working on the SeniorQuoter admin site. Each participant was assigned to be the lead on a particular feature for the first phase. Michael Gdovin will be working on the configuration and install pages. Gary Hunt will be working on the view quotes page and the approval system. Shawn Ard will be working on the Colors and Design sections. Sean Maguire will work on the authentication and admin users. The managing students and passwords section is still open. Michael Plasmeier will coordinate and assist the other participants.

The Week of 12/10/2007

The week got off to an uneven start as Michel Plasmeier rushed to get the framework for the new admin site up and issuing test accounts on his new server. However, it was still a productive week as the team got used to using Subversion to track revisions.

Micheal Plasmeier

Michael Plasmeier designed the site (using the Wordpress admin theme) and installed the basic framework. This week Michael started to think about the paths SeniorQuoter would run on and he learned how to write a "flat-file" configuration page.

Admin Theme CSS

Shawn Ard

Shawn Ard cleaned up the interface a bit and started to work on his color configuration page. This page will allow schools to easily customize SeniorQuoter to their school's colors. In the future, this page will have a color wheel (from Drupal) to assist color selection.

Color Page Code so far

Sean Maguire

Sean Maguire is building the authentication and admin users section. This week he designed the database schema and built the registration, view users, and edit users page.

	 CREATE TABLE `admin_users` ( 	 
	   `id` int(10) NOT NULL auto_increment, 	 
	   `first_name` varchar(20) NOT NULL, 	 
	   `last_name` varchar(30) NOT NULL, 	 
	   `email` varchar(100) NOT NULL, 	 
	   `password` char(40) NOT NULL, 	 
	   `timestamp` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP on update CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, 	 
	   `authorized_by` int(10) NOT NULL, 	 
	   `lastlogonIP` int(10) NOT NULL, 	 
	   PRIMARY KEY  (`id`), 	 
	   UNIQUE KEY `email` (`email`) 	 
	 ) ENGINE=MyISAM;

Admin Users Page

Gary Hunt

Gary Hunt finished the listing of quotes page very fast because he clearly knows what he is doing. After that, he started to work on an "approval" system and designed the additional database schema for the system. He will implement this next week.

View Quotes Page Code

Michael Gdovin

Michael Gdovin built the configuration page for SeniorQuoter. This page will collect things like the name of the school and quote length limit and output them into a static configuration file.

Config Page Code

(A daily can be found on ThePlaz.com)

Our group study in web design at Haverford High School is going wonderfully. We are about 2 weeks in and are already done PHP basics. Tomorrow we will start on databases. We're going along much faster than I expected. We were also able to talk about design and CSS a bit. We also did some work with validation and standard XHTML.

Student Work

• Sean Maguire's Comment Form
• Shawn Ard's Tip Calculator
• Michael Gdovin's Tip Calculator
• Gary Hunt's Array Test

Friday was the first day of Haverford High School's group study in web design. It was an unexpected extra day, quarters normally change on Mondays. However, this extra day was good because we were able to finalize the participants.

• Michael Plasmeier (ThePlaz), leads the group, as the founder and lead developer for SeniorQuoter. He has several successful websites, and knows a lot about PHP/MySQL. His website is ThePlaz.com
• Michael Gdovin, is the founder of w3life a new media technology project. Michael is excited to learn PHP and MySQL. His website is Gdovin.net
• Shawn Ard, is a sophomore who excited to take part in this group study. He is a member of Team 484, the robotics team at Haverford.
• Sean Maguire, is also a sophomore who is a member of Team 484, the robotics team at Haverford. He runs Philles.tk, a website about the Philadelphia sports team.
• Gary Hunt rounds out the team. He is a senior at Haverford who also is a member of Team 484, the robotics team at Haverford. He is excited to start making some websites!

The day started out a bit rough, as there was some problems with the development sever. However, Plaz set aside the server to be fixed over the weekend, and instead lead a discussion on how the internet and PHP works. The discussion went very well due to the small number of participants, causing everyone to be engaged.

Mrs. Jane Greenspun also stopped by. Mrs. Greenspun is the director of technology for Haverford School District and is the mentor for our class. We appreciate her support.

We also would like to thank Mrs. Fish, the publications director for allowing us to use her room and for her continued support (and beta testing) of SeniorQuoter. We would also like to thank Mr. Jeffery Nesbitt, the principal of HHS, for his support in organizing the group study. Also thank you to Blu Talyor for his support along with Mr. Rob Anderson. Without the support of the administration, this group study would not be possible.

More details can be found here about the group study. Stay tuned to seniorquoter.org for planned weekly updates.

SeniorQuoter 1.4.2 fixes a small, but fairly important bug in how characters are counted after a quote is submitted.

Certain special characters (&, ", < and >) were incorrectly counted by the second pass, server side counter, in previous versions of SeniorQuoter, causing quotes which passed the length limits imposed by the "live" JavaScript counter, to be rejected after the quote was submitted. All yearbooks should upgrade to this version to insure that users are not incorrectly told that their quotes are too long. The only file which changed is: '/includes/functions.inc.php', so only that file needs to be overwritten.

Download v1.4.2 from SourceForge

These bugs were found by Haverford High School's Class of 2008. Thank you for putting up with and reporting the bugs!

SeniorQuoter 1.4.1 offers several bug fixes and new configuration options. As always, you can get SeniorQuoter from SourceForge.

• Added: Spell Check Server Configuration (If you don't want to use Google's servers - not supported)
• Fixed: The quote counter at the top of the page now does not re-count quotes which have been updated. It now accurately reflects the number of people who have submitted quotes.
• Fixed: After submitting a quote, PHP checks if the length of the quote exceeds the length limit set by the administrator. PHP used to count new lines as 2 characters, when the "live" JavaScript counter would count them as one. This would lead to a situation, where if a senior had a quote with many returns and neared the length limit, the "live" JS counter would say their quote was acceptable, but when it was submitted, PHP would report that it was too long. This is no longer the case.
• Changed: Some language has been changed to sound more professional, and one spelling error has been fixed.

Download 1.4.1 Now!