Progress on the Mountain Rescue website

Blogged by Steve Parks on Saturday, 6 January 2010

It's now nearly 8pm on Saturday, and I now have wifi access in a cafe (we've been without access at the mountain rescue centre) - so it's time for a quick roundup of progress.

* We scoped out the user stories with the head of the mountain rescue team to make sure we build the site that best suits the needs of their visitors and staff.
* A local dev server was set up by Alice, Stephen Mount, and Dan giving us a drupal 6.15 codebase to build the site on, plus an installation of Atrium for project management.
* We transferred the database of the atrium site that Pilot had setup for the project to this local server (it took ages to download via my phone's data connection on GPRS!
* Chris and Dan very quickly got to work on the meatiest part of the site - the incident reports. These go back decades, and with an average of around 100 incidents per year there's alot to bring across. They started by planning the CCK content type for incidents, working out the fields that would be needed, what Views would be needed etc. The aim is to then make these into a Feature that can be used by other mountain rescue teams.
* Dave began the hard work of getting all the incident reports from the static HTML pages into a csv file ready for import into the new nodetype.
* Chris is working on importing the large photo library.
* Dan designed a great look for the site - it'll look amazing.
* Matt has been wireframing all the pages.
* Stephen Mount and Simon have been developing a theme from Dan's design and Matt's layouts.
* Andrew has been working out the geo-location (especially conversions from OS grid references to lat/long), mapping and so on.
* Steve Hodgkins and Tim have been developing the static pages for the site - writing the content, gathering images etc.
* Once the local server was set up David began the hard work of entering all our user stories (from index cards) onto the Atrium project management site.
* Kam recorded video interviews with the team, tours of the base and other material, took photos, and kept notes on progress to record the weekend for posterity.
* David and I co-ordinated between teams to keep the project flowing.
* Alice wrangled the network.
* Ceri (known as Duck) fed us with amazing food - a good hearty breakfast, and a great lunch. Butternut Squash and Apple soup, jacket potatoes, bread and hummous etc.

At this stage it means the actual site is starting to come together. The design and wireframes are essentially done. The theme is in development. The content types are designed, the data is being imported and more.

So we're making progress although it has been a bit of a frustrating day with the network issues. Chris put it best when he said he feels he's two hours behind where he'd like to be at this stage. So we're planning a late night tonight - but first it's time to drive up that long, windy, icy hill to the youth hostel for what promises to be a delicious dinner of curry from Duck. Plus some beers of course. More when we're next in internet reach tomorrow.

• STEVE PARKS, Captain
• Login to post comments