For the first time in a month or so (maybe longer) I’ve actually managed to write this on a Friday instead of the following week!

Anyway, this week has consisted of more “oran” skin/interface development. A large part of this has revolved around repairing various aspects of the Berry Baskets functionality. Although the original Berry Baskets problem (that prevented it from functioning at all) was fixed a long time ago, new problems have been “created” with the recent changes to various parts of the interface and testing has revealed some problems we were not aware of until recently.

One of the largest problems we discovered was that the drag and drop Javascript code (the code that allows users to move berries to the Berry Basket) we use did not work at all in Internet Explorer 9, despite working fine in earlier versions of Internet Explorer as well as Firefox and Chrome. After doing some research on the subject we discovered that it was a problem with a Javascript library we use. We use the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library to provide us with drag and drop functionality and we discovered that versions of the library before version 2.9.0 (the latest version at the time of writing this) all have this problem as well. As we were using YUI version 0.9.0 it was assumed that upgrading to this latest version would break other parts of the program. Fortunately this wasn’t the case and the upgrade went smoothly and the problem is now fixed.

With the recent changes to the way the classifiers (Subject/Organisation etc.) are displayed (see my previous blog entry) it was not surprising to find that Berry Baskets did not work properly with the documents displayed in that view. Fortunately, thanks to the previously mentioned problem we now have a much better understanding of the Berry Basket code and as a result it was fairly straight forward to fix this problem. There were also several more minor issues that have also been fixed.

Next week I will continue fixing up the interface and Berry Baskets as there is still more to fix (for example, in Internet Explorer the berry system does not properly maintain its state from one page to the next). Once these issues are resolved I will be able to move on to some of the other things we want to get done before we release 3.05.

Categories: Greenstone3