Rockin’ and Rollin’

With a generally clear plan of how we will accomplish our goals for the website, we have significantly ramped up our work adding the necessary content and features. The primary feature we have added is an events display, which shows the events stored in the database in a list, and can be filtered based on type of event and date. Currently, we do not have it working so that the different filters can be used at the same time - that is, you can only filter by date or by type - but we hope to get that working soon. We also do not have the capability to filter by location. We hope to be able to allow the user to enter an address and find events within some radius of that location, but to do this we need to use a map API which will calculate the distance between the events and the location. While Google Maps is the most common API for this application, it has a pricing model which could cause our collaborator to be charged a significant amount if the website usage became too great. We have been looking for other free open source APIs we could use as a substitute to make sure that the website is scalable and that increased traffic wouldn’t result in large costs for the collaborator. If we are not able to find such a solution, our fall-back plan is to have a pull-down of towns to filter with.

With all of the pages created, we have also begun populating content on the website. This is taking rather longer than we expected, as we are implementing a significant amount of the content in what Wix calls “dynamic pages.” Dynamic pages include a template, and a database of information. The template is connected to the database so that for each row in the database a page is created based on the template. This allows us to ensure consistency between pages of the same type (for example, the pages for each protected area), and should make it easier to add different items in a set in the future for our collaborators. We have run into a couple of issues with this, however, including the lack of multilingual support in Wix’s databases. In most parts of the website, text boxes can just be translated for each language version, but since this is not the case for databases, creating a multilingual site is a little more tricky. Our plan is to create columns for different languages for each text property in the database, and then modify code using Wix’s corvid tool so that the correct columns are used to populate the dynamic pages for each language. While this does complicate the website slightly, we hope that the dynamic pages will still have a speed advantage over creating individual pages for each item in a set. We are hoping to have all of these issues resolved by early next week, so that we can continue tackling our ambitious plans, in hopes of creating a very helpful website for the Transylvanian Highlands.