[AG-TECH] Node Listing Beta on AGCentral ...

Darran Edmundson darran.edmundson at anu.edu.au
Mon Aug 1 02:24:20 CDT 2005


Hi All,

I've spent the last two weeks learning how to develop add-on
products for the Plone-based community portal www.agcentral.org.
It's a steep learning curve but there's finally something to show ...

Members can now add a "Node Listing" with information about
their local room.  As an example, here's the page for our local node
at the ANU:
     http://agcentral.org/Members/dee900/huxley-ag/

To add your own node to the listings, follow these steps:
1) Login to www.agcentral.org
2) Go to your "my folder" area.  (You might need to refresh the
welcome page to see this appear on the horizontal navbar.  There
seems to be a caching problem with the site.)
3) Under "Add New Item", select "Node Listing".
4) Fill out the information.  Red dots indicate required fields. The
short name is what will show up in the URL, e.g "huxley-ag".  (I
got our GPS coordinates of "-35.2831,149.1136" by looking at
the URL on Google Maps.)
5) Use the 'Save' button at the bottom of the page.
6) You should now see your node listing in "View" mode (this is
how others will see it - they don't have access to the "Edit" page.)

Your node listing is now in the database.  Try a search up at the
top right.  Entry your country, or your city, and search.  Your node
listing should appear in the list.  Over the next few days I'll
add a "Node Listings" tab to the site and a page for doing various
kinds of searches.  Imagine, "show me all nodes where it is
currently business hours?" or "show me all nodes within 150km
of here".

Now it's worth stressing that this is a Beta version of the Node
Listing.  I can't guarantee that the data you enter will survive the
next few iterations and final roll-out.   You might end up entering
this info again, hopefully not, but maybe.

How this product evolves depends *completely* on the feedback
that shows up in the forum:
    http://agcentral.org/forums/misc/agcentral
What data is missing?  How would you change the layout?
What kinds of search ability are you after?

Cheers,
Darran.

Darran Edmundson (darran.edmundson at anu.edu.au)
ANU Supercomputer Facility Vizlab
Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2600
tel: +61 2 6125-0517  fax: +61 2 6125-5088





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