Saturday, January 22, 2004
Staff Listings
Mike C. has developed a clever PHP script that lists a chosen number of people per page, starting at a chosen letter, and with the option of a department filter. This was his original version and here's the tweaked version. This looks close, visually speaking, to the staff lists we used to have within the SCISM website - but the functionality is much better, and the data now comes from the University's PhoneBook database rather than our own private staff database. The smiley icons (I've used a new icon) now link to people's PhoneBook pages rather than their photos. I think it's a BIG improvement over what we have currently.
One thing that Mike's script has brought to light is that there are errors in the PhoneBook database - such as individual members of staff who appear to belong to two different departments by virtue of having two separate PhoneBook entries. I will email Karen W. - our PhoneBook administrator - to bring this to her attention.
Note (added 24/2/05)
Mike has dealt with the PhoneBook errors in masterly fashion...
From: mike Subject: Re: Staff Listings Date: 24 February 2005 15:44:56 GMT To: martin I have implemented a national bakery school listing and made a few other adjustments to the staff list today. It now COMBINES information from multiple entries for the same person. This means that where someone is in two departments their department will show something like MS/HRM. It also means that if someone has a phone number in only one of their records it will always get displayed. It also means that if someone has two different rooms, telephone numbers etc. these will be shown the same way as the departments. Less usefully - but indicating errors - it does the same thing with titles. You will see a few Dr/Prof entries and even one Mr/Miss entry. It is easy to turn off this concatanation behaviour on a column by column basis, but I left it as it is at the moment to indicate errornous data. In contrast, I have gone back to only showing the one department in departmental listings. I also encoded the email addresses using html entities like the phonebook (although I suspect any robot capable of parsing html and finding mailto: links is also capable of interpreting html entities, then again at least the ones that can't are foiled). I have implemented a national bakery school listing and made a few other adjustments to the staff list today. It now COMBINES information from multiple entries for the same person. This means that where someone is in two departments their department will show something like MS/HRM. It also means that if someone has a phone number in only one of their records it will always get displayed. It also means that if someone has two different rooms, telephone numbers etc. these will be shown the same way as the departments. Less usefully - but indicating errors - it does the same thing with titles. You will see a few Dr/Prof entries and even one Mr/Miss entry. It is easy to turn off this concatanation behaviour on a column by column basis, but I left it as it is at the moment to indicate errornous data. In contrast, I have gone back to only showing the one department in departmental listings. I also encoded the email addresses using html entities like the phonebook (although I suspect any robot capable of parsing html and finding mailto: links is also capable of interpreting html entities, then again at least the ones that can't are foiled). |