The WGBH.org Development Blog

After weeks and months of working on something you can easily forget that - at some point - it actually has to get done! Well, I’m not able to say that our new TV Programs and Schedules module is completed yet, but we have reached a big milestone: principal development is done!

What does that mean? Well, it means that Pete and I have coded up everything that we know about to the specifications provided and now it’s ready to be fully tested. You could basically call it an alpha release of the front and back end code.

Exciting? That’s one word for it.

The last piece of the puzzle was a custom search module, that Pete has coded up, based on the core Drupal search module. Basically, it’s search scoped to our TV programs and episodes (that’s all the content we have in Drupal just now anyways). Down the line, as we rebuild the whole rest of WGBH.org, we also envision a scoped search for each major subsite (e.g. one for radio, one for web only content, etc.), plus some sort of global search across everything.

We’ll write up more about how search was implemented later but for now, here’s a sneak peak:

Our goal in the next few days is to get the code base installed on our test/staging servers, document how things work and then let our content producers and functional testers have at it!

Obviously, I don’t anticipate there being any bugs, issues or blemishes of any sort. But we’ll go through the charade of testing anyways, just make everybody feel good!