Strange but true.
The other day, I was determined to accomplish the migration of the entire portal from Drupal to WordPress within this official last week of my internship. However, it still surprised me a little bit when I actually completed building the whole portal in wordpress within two days. I was not exposed to wordpress web development before, but it seems that drupal has helped me to become more experienced with site building, module functions and data importing. The site can be accessed at the link here: Berea College Office of Sustainability.
I also managed to put up the slideshow of icons with internal links on all pages. I informed Ms. Pauly about this new site, and asked her for any changes and data that she would like to see on the site. Seconds after my email, I was contacted by Ms. Dangerfield, project associate of Berea College Office of Sustainability, to make a few changes on the previous drupal portal which she already linked to the parent Berea College website. Hence, I communicated with her about the new wordpress portal, and she efficiently responded to me with some suggested changes, which I complied promptly.
The backend of data warehouse in wordpress can be imported directly from either google drive or local files. The advantage of syncing google spreadsheet and charts is that the data can be automatically updated if changes are to be made within google drive. For the local file option, updated files need to be uploaded to the server to implant any changes for the charts. This is a very convenient way of data importing, but the downside is that each chart needs to be generated from one spreadsheet. Therefore, a summary page will be meaningless if the chart is to generate data specifically for one month or for one type of recycle or solid waste. It implies that all data needs to be dispersed in spreadsheets in order to make individual graphs. Unless all data are connected to parent data which can be modified and updated, it will be cumbersome for the administrator to go in each sheet and modify the scattered spreadsheets. I can manually connect each cell of one sheet to the parent page, but it is tedious for me to repeat the same procedure for all the sheets. After consulting Dr. Heggen, he suggested that I could write a plug-in for google drive, which will generate a linked spreadsheet for each row within the parent page, which I believe could be of tremendous use for massive data.
I have decided to work on that during the rest of the week while at the same time working on the suggestions from Ms. Pauly and Ms. Dangerfield. Completing the wordpress portal in two days is encouraging and splendid, but on the other hand, it is a little gloomy to consider that it took me about two weeks to paddle within Drupal and figure out all that I needed to do. Apparently, in terms of site development, drupal is more arduous than wordpress, because one needs to be familiar with crucial concepts such as content types, views, fields, etc. I spent some time working on features such as slideshow for both platforms but they were removed to not distract the users from accessing the data. As I was surfing through drupal, I was also learning and attempting to develop a module on my own, which I later disregarded since I figured out an alternative way to achieve what I intended.
All I could say at the end of today was that my journeys with both drupal and wordpress have been most marvelous, and I appreciated their differences in terms of technical management and user-friendliness. Nonetheless, choosing one over another for my personal preference is yet a difficult decision to make.
Computer Science Internship 