Next phase

I've now completed the development for phase 1 of the Lawn Calendar.  It's now on the test server where we are going to leave it until we are ready to deploy to a full paid server.

Before we can fully go live, I want to set up the following:

• www.lawncalendar.co.uk domain name for the site (registered).
• A forum where users can discuss the application and suggest features and improvements.
• Search engine optimisation (SEO) so that people can find the application from Google and Bing.
• Facebook 'like' and Twitter 'tweet' buttons on the application (maybe)
• Add legal disclaimer, t&c etc

Update:

Forum: now set up at freeforums

Some webpages with royalty free disclaimer, t&c examples:

http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/layer?r.l1=1073861197&r.l2=1074448560&r.s=tl&topicId=1076141950
http://legal123.com.au/is-it-better-to-have-a-website-disclaimer-or-terms-and-conditions-on-my-website/

There was an issue with uploading images with upper case extensions.  Here's an article that talks about this:

http://forums.asp.net/t/1682158.aspx/1

Merging LMC and Content manager

To hand over the LMC to the the testers, I needed to publish the application on a hosting server.  I found one that is free to host for 90 days (3 months).  Eventually, I'll upgrade to a paid service, but this free one will do for now.

One limitation of the free hosting service is that you can only install one application at a time.  The service is intended as an aid for students to learn ASP, so they don't want commercial applications.  So to get around this limitation, I needed to put the content management application in with the main LMC application, so that they shared the same web.config file.  I could then use custom routes to access the content manager.  I also needed a way of specifying different layouts for the LMC and the content manager.   

Here are a couple of links that helped out:

http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/controllers-and-routing/creating-custom-routes-cs
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5161380/how-do-i-specify-different-layouts-in-the-asp-net-mvc-3-razor-viewstart-file


Once installed, I ran into the old UK vs US dates problem when trying to submit maintenance task data to the controllers.  Found this solution which creates a model binder to handle the date conversion.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9821407/mvc3-en-gb-dates-in-get

Date Filtering and Back to the weather API

I've been working on the LMC all weekend with the intention of finishing it off so I can start on another project next week while the stakeholder is away!

Date Filtering

Whist I was building out the Content Manager application, it dawned on me that I couldn't use the basic date range filtering that I had been using. The reason for this is that the content date ranges aren't actually date ranges because they do not have a year element. For example, one range might be 02/03 to 02/06 whereas anther may be 10/10 to 10/02 (i.e. go over a year boundary). The only thing I could assume is that a period would always be less than a year long.

So, once I had replaced the display and editor templates in the Content Manager to work with dd/mm entries. I had to revisit the LMC application and write some custom filtering logic to replace the basic date between logic.

Weather API

I'd been looking at weather widgets from various sources, and whilst they ware all very nice, none of them really ticked all the boxes for what I wanted. I had two main criteria. Firstly they need to be able to take a post code district as a parameter. Secondly, the size and styling of the widget had to fit in with the look and feel of the Lawn Maintenance Calendar style. The closest I got to finding a widget that worked was the Met Office one. It looked good on the site, but there was no way of dynamically sending through a post code district.

Initially, I'd played with World Weather Online's free weather API, which is a nice little rest service. But I stopped playing with it when I discovered the widgets because I didn't want to re-invent the wheel, so to speak. But I went back to the API in the end because it was the only solution that could match my acceptance criteria. It accepts a post code district as an input and because it just returns the data and image links as XML, I'm free to present it in any way I wish. This is great because I could use ASP.NET MVC display templates to lay out the forecast just like the widgets that I had been using (very MVC). I could then use the same styling that is used throughout the application to style the 'widget' so it looked like it was part of the rest of the app. I have to say, I'm very happy with the result.

The next thing I need to do was ask the user for the postcode district (the first part of the postcode). Initially, I was going to ask the user to register for an account and specify the postcode at the registration stage, but after having a good think about this, I decided to just use a cookie instead. I'll probably be adding user accounts at a later stage when I introduce personal notes to the calendar. For the time being, using cookies to capture and keep the postcode district works well.

So, I've now completed the development for the first phase of the Lawn Maintenance Calendar. I now need to get it tested by the content manager before putting it live.