Archive for the ‘Downloads’ Category
October 1st, 2009 | 
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In case you fine folks missed it, you have got to check out NC State’s new twitter site, http://twitter.ncsu.edu. It is a joint project between our group and Web Communications that was launched on September 8th, and we now have over 60 organizations tweeting on campus and you can find them all here.
While everyone working on the project thought it was really cool, I think we were all pleasantly surprised by the awesome reaction that we have gotten from other folks in the Higher Education community. The day after we launched the site, the twitterverse was buzzing about the site. Here are just a few tweets that I found particularly encouraging.
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This is the first article in a series introducing our readers to some of the applications that we work on. A lot of the applications we write go unnoticed by the masses because they are targeted at a specific workflow or person, so we thought it would be cool to let everyone know what we are up to!
If you have been building applications long enough, you know that there are some things that you have to do with EVERY app you create. Authentication, authorization, user management, etc. No matter what the purpose of the app, you always have to deal with these things, and you are continually re-creating the same basic functionality with every new app. Perhaps it is a little different from app to app, but the concept is the same.
Perhaps we were totally late to the game, but we noticed this trend soon after we got into the Zend Framework. Zend Framework solved a lot of these problems for us. They had mechanisms for dealing with authentication and authorization, databases, forms, etc. It was great, so we created our first Zend Framework app, Billboard.
After we had totally drank the Zend Framework koolaid, we started working on another new app and realized that we wanted some of the interfaces we created in Billboard for our new app, so we went to the billboard project, copied what we needed, and moved on. That worked great until we found a bug in our login page. We fixed it, but the bug was still in our Billboard project. Quickly we changed projects and fixed the bug there. That is fine if we only have 2 projects, but we were planning to run all our projects with Zend Framework. What to do?
Day 3, here we come!
Breakfast was good. There was OJ and biscuits this morning. There was also a raffle, but our group didn’t win anything.
Digital Signage with Billboard
We had a vested interest in this session. Andrew Stein from ECE presented about how they have taken our Billboard product and added a few features to satisfy their needs. Lots of good discussion about the reasons for digital signs and how Billboard will help. There were some requests for download links for Billboard, so if you want to download it, you can do that here.
Day 2 recap! Here we go….
Breakfast
Overall, pretty good. One complaint is that there was no juice, just water and coffee.
UNCW Text Message Applications
UNCW is doing some interesting things with texting, although not really revolutionary. Similar to what was done in the last election, they have setup a code that students can use to get information about campus happenings (2 way automated texting, rather than one way only). They have developed some apps that seem to help students get associated with campus (trivia, events, etc). I learned some stuff about the SMS system in general, so it was worth it.
As you can tell, we have recently moved our site to use Wordpress. One of the things that we wanted to do was expand our development to more than just applications, so we got the opportunity to do that a little bit with our first hurdle in moving to Wordpress: Authentication.
It’s really not that big of a deal to remember yet another username/password. We could have just done that and used Wordpress’s standard authentication, but we wanted to do something more. We wanted to use our NCSU unity ID’s and passwords to authenticate, so we decided to write a WRAP module.
If you use Wordpress and are on campus, maybe this plugin will help. Basically, you have some options with it. You can tell the plugin to create user accounts on the first time they log in, or you can force an admin to create the account first. Make sure you follow the readme.txt file to install this plugin. You can download the plugin below.