[geo] Re: Geo Help 2 1/2

[Michael Viron <mviron@findaschool.org>]

>I've had a look at it. I find it somewhat _ugly_. <grin> Actually, what I
>mean is that I find it too damn complicated. <grin>

That's part of the problem of it being directly stemmed off of the
prototype (as opposed to being re-written).  Before, it was much more
complicated.  index.php3, was over 1,000 lines long.
>
>So how can I develop? Can you create a folder off geo_html that I can work
>in? And then I'll write code to do the moderation function, if that would
>be ok. 

Actually, you can work out of the geodev_html directory (which I believe is
currently set to use the same db as the current prod version (under
geo_html).  All you would need is to be added to the 'geo' group.  I'll
make sure permissions are set up correctly when I get home tonight. (note,
arma or whoever gets to this first, please add les to the geo group)
>My understanding of the database structure:
>1) Basic - Name - faculty -- Nope, this is the full name of the
Educational facility.
>	Link - URL or Link to "Link table"?  URL.
>	Country - should be link to ISO table or is link to current
>country table?  Currently this does not link to anything.  The Country
Name is specified directly in this field.
>	State/Prov
>	Category - should be link to Category Table? - it could be, although that
isn't the way it's currently set up.  This is the field that specifies
which 'category' something is in (at least for the US).  This can be either
'Career', 'CC' or 'Univ'
>
>Other possible fields:
>	Language - language of faculty? -- I've had people ask about that, and I
don't know that it should be added yet, as adding 'additional' information
is very time consuming (try manually editing over 8,100 entries).
>
>2) Country - Category - why another category field since we already have
>one in the basic field? -- This is used to split the United States into
'Universities' and 'Community Colleges'.  It's a 'bugfix' from the earlier
prototype version of v2.
>	Print_country - what's this? - This is the Country name that actually
gets displayed to the screen if the country name has spaces in it.  It's
another 'bugfix' that came about because I could not get country selects to
work properly when the country had a space in it.
>	Count - What's this? -- The number of entries listed in a given country.
It's an administrative tool.
>
>3) Auth - table of admins. Should there be another field to give enhanced
>status to some of them (ie. allow user creation)
Probably a good idea.  If this were perfect, it would probably separate out
permissions to add / edit / delete entries (ie, links, countries, and
educational facilities), as well as user administration.
>
>4) Links - must be linked to from "Basic" table. Why do we have category
>again? Why do we have "name" again? (since the name is the faculty name
>once a join is done.)
Actually, links isn't linked to from the Basic table.  Links is a table
containing information from the 'Awards and Misc' page (basically a list of
sites linking to General Education Online).  Take a look at
http://findaschool.org/index.php?Type=Links .
>
>Sorry to be a pain but I think it's pretty important that I understand the
>basic database structure first. Merci, Merci.
>
>Do you want me to remove the basic_old table? (which is empty).

Go right ahead.

Like I mentioned previously, GEO v2.5 will be (pretty much) a ground up
re-write of the entire codebase and db schema.  We should probably start
thinking about how we want the db schema to look for v2.5, since that will
be when any 'major' changes will have to occur.  Actually, let's go ahead
and start setting up devel.findaschool.org as the v2.5 site, since I think
geo v2 is stable enough that we won't have to worry about much other than
some 'bugfix' releases.

Michael