The WGBH.org Development Blog

Filed by Phil at 8:58 am under Drupal, Television, PHP, Testing

This week brought good news and bad news. Actually, more like very good news and pretty annoying news. First, the very good news:

We have officially posted some pages for internal testing! Behold…

TV Programs A-Z (click to enlarge)

Nothing too fancy here. On our current site the A-Z list is a popup. But now it’s a full grown page! One note: the Search TV Programs form does not yet work, on this page or any other.

TV Schedule Grid (click to enlarge)

Now we’re talking! The grid is the big magilla of this project. It finally allows us to display schedule information for all of our channels at once. Basically, we’re finally catching up to the rest of the world.

As you can see, the grid displays schedule information in three hour blocks. The user can navigate forward or backward or jump to a specific block of time using the Pick a Time form at the top. There is also the calendar selector, which lets users view the schedules for a given day. Note how the calendar highlights the current day (or the day of the schedule that you’re looking at), as well as the schedule data window, the period of time for which we display schedule data which, as of now, is one week week back, two weeks forward (almost).

We still need to play around with limiting the number of characters in the program or episode title that we display on the grid. There’s always something…

Full Day TV Schedules by Channel (click to enlarge)

As you can see, the full day schedule shares the calendar selector with the grid, and replaces the Pick a Time selector with a Pick a Channel form. Nice!

Now we can proceed with some preliminary testing, while Pete and I get to work on the program/series, episode, search and other pages.

Ok, on to the pretty annoying news. This… (click to enlarge)…

…is still happening.

Under a couple of different scenarios, the underlying PHP process uses up its allotted memory and then - like one of my kids - holds its breath and refuses to continue until is gets what it wants (more memory!). The above error was generated simply by trying to enable the theme developer. It can also happen during our nightly schedule data ingest, though our current allocation of 512MB is enough to prevent this, thank goodness.

So far all I’ve been able to confirm is that it’s not a server configuration issue. It seems to be a code leak and there may be more than one culprit out there. It’s starting to give me real headaches and needs to be resolved in the not too distant future.

However, for now, I refuse to let it ruin my weekend!

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Filed by Phil at 10:21 am under Drupal, Television, Testing

Been a low-key week here at WGBH Online World Headquarters, or as we call it WOW HQ.

The big event of the week: I got a haircut. All that goofy hair on my head was making it hard to think properly, so I had quite a bit of it lopped off. Things should really start picking up now.

Pete and I have been finishing up our first pass at the TV schedule pages (a multi-channel grid, full day schedules by channel, and a Programs A-Z list). Doesn’t sound like much, just three pages (basically), but there’s quite a bit involved, as you might imagine.

The plan is to get these pages in shape and then post to our test suite for a preliminary round of testing. This testing will be done by people other than Pete and I and the purpose is really just to evaluate how well the data is being imported from PBS. We haven’t worked up a formal test plan yet, but it will most likely involve comparing the WGBH schedules on PBS.org (which use the exact same TV Guide data) to the schedules we’re producing with the new code. We won’t yet be testing the ability to modify this information locally.

Needless to say, testing is just an annoying formality. The odds of there being any bugs in our code are minimal.

I’ve also been working with our new project manager Louise (Hi, Louise! I know you’re reading this…) to help fully flesh out the project tasks and schedule. That’s been a long process but I think we finally have all of the pieces laid out and scheduled.

In addition to the schedule page testing, we’ve also blocked out a longer period of time for full functional testing after we complete all of the development for this module (i.e. schedule pages and program and episode pages), as you would expect. Again, that’s testing outside to be done by others distinct from the unit testing that Pete and I do during coding. We thought about trying to break out functional testing into a more discreet chunks, but given the relatively small size of this project, it didn’t seem to make sense.

OK, I gotta go wrap up these schedule pages. Don’t forget to call mom on Sunday! I mean your mom, not mine. I’ll handle her.

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