I’m working on redoing UMBC’s Online Schedule of Classes page. The current version is generated by a big, messy Perl script that reads the raw data uploaded from the HP3000, formats it, generates pages for all the individual disciplines, and then generates the top-level page (which contains links for each semester along with links to various informational pages). What’s the problem, you ask? Well, all of the HTML (except for a few PHP includes for headers, footers, and style info) is hardcoded into the Perl script. You can make modifications to the generated HTML pages, but they get immediately overwritten the next morning when the script runs to regenerate them. Any time someone needs a permanent change (which happens frequently, because the Academic Services folks are always tweaking their informational links, particularly during advance registration), it has to go through me. This is a hassle both for me, and for the folks who need the changes made.
The Perl script is old. It dates to 1996 or so. The model it uses is outdated. It needs to be rewritten so that the Academic Services folks can manage the content themselves. The whole thing is just begging to be rewritten in PHP or some other embedded language, but unfortunately I don’t have time (or staff) to sit down and make a major project out of this right now. So, for now I’ll settle for slow, incremental improvements.
My first tweak was to rework the script so that it uses PHP includes to read the auxiliary links for the top-level page. That way, the AS folks can manipulate auxiliary links themselves, and they will show up instantly (rather than having to wait until the script runs overnight). This is a quick win, and should eliminate the bulk of the busy-work I have been doing to support this. However, I’m not sure it’ll work perfectly, because the AS staff are using Dreamweaver to edit all of their HTML content, and I’m not sure if Dreamweaver can edit partial HTML files, or if it’ll try to add its own tags all over the place. As with everything around here, time will tell, and we’ll tweak things down the road as necessary.