Recreating the Beast
I went into this weekend with a project on my shoulders. This project is the DJ Challenge which happens to be a rap battle created by the amazing Harry Cassin. I did not know how the previous voting system worked, so this was not good.
Jeremy Wilken, the webmaster before me, was amazing at coding. He was also was very good at training me. However, he couldn’t teach me everything he knew. One of the things that he didn’t teach me was how the DJ Challenge system worked. By my judgement, this is the most complicated thing on the website. Not only does it let people vote for things, but it plays audio and displays little bar graphs, all generated by PHP and MySQL. Before Jeremy left for Germany he gave me all of the files he had on his computer. I had to walk through the thirty-something PHP files to figure out exactly how the system worked. It’s really quite elegant and amazing. There’s a database that holds all of the votes. The voting page is a iFrame (not to be confused with an iPhone) embedded in the Joomla CMS, which allows for it to look nice and run form elements otherwise shunned by CMS.
After I figured out how every file worked, I found a wierd redundancy that brought the voter to a page that looked like the WVUR site, but was on a different server. I decided to get rid of this and just display the voting confirmation/error message in the iFrame.
I never thought I would get out of this project sane, let alone with a better solution. Please let me know how you like the voting process either by email (jeff.lange1@valpo.edu) or in person.
-JL