More boring non-news from the coal-face at the heart of the UPSU website. Or something...
First up, our SEF URL system - which lets us use URLs like "www.upsu.net/sociallife" instead of "www.upsu.net/index.php?option= com_content &task=view&Itemid= 123&id=blahblahblah... - has been fairly extensively hacked about, so we can now create pages with whatever URL we like, on the fly, and we can also go back and change the URL of existing pages.
So now there's a list of about 200 redirects (where you type in one URL, e.g. upsu.net/clubs, and you arrive at another page, e.g. upsu.net/comtent/view/212/121) on the server which need to be converted into the new style URLs - i.e. where the page is actually at the URL you typed in, and not some obscure, generic URL that you probably won't remember. One of the first mini-sites to fully use this system is the Graduation Ball collection of pages - the next thing to concentrate on are the club and society homepages.
Hopefully it'll make the location of pages around the site easier to remember...
T'other thing I've been tweaking is another addition to our content editing system; a "Custom CSS" field, which lets content editors add their own CSS definitions to the page, inside the tags. This means we can start using more standardised CSS - instead of the current trend to make use of inline styles. However, it's not a "proper" CSS implementation as the definitions are still loaded in the page instead of from a separate - cacheable - .css file. That's coming next... Maybe... (Watch out for the next instalment in this blog - "How I broke UPSU.net in two easy steps"... Ahem...).
After a meeting yesterday, I've got a better idea of how the NUS card system is going to be run next year - instead of there being only one type of NUS card, in it's infinite wisdom, the NUS has decided to offer a choice of a standard "Democracy" card for the current asking price, or an "NUS Extra" card which offers a wider range of discounts and offers, with a commensurate increase in price to match.
From the students' point of view, you'll either be asked to choose which card you would like when you sign up on UPSU.net, or you'll be given the choice when you come up to collect your card in October. More information about the NUS Extra card can be found at www.nusextra.com, and we'll be adding more information shortly once the details are finalised.
Talking of which, I really should go and get ready to turn off the NUS card registration system over the summer. Another thing for me to break then...(!).
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