Mr Portman | Primary School Teacher

Calling all teachers interested in web apps!

Mr Portman — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:55:45 +0000

I’ve come across a Google Docs spreadsheet by way of Tom Barrett, one of the more prolific education twitterers out there. The aim of the document is to collect data on what services are blocked or unblocked by all the LAs in England and Wales.

This is important! As teachers excited by technology many of us are being prevented from innovating because our LAs are blocking everything we come across. I’m fascinated by this document. Already I can see that Norfolk LA is stricter than all the others completed so far, whereas Notts is the least restrictive.

Please, if you are a teacher in England or Wales, could you have a look and contribute. All you need is a Google Docs account. Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/bEwfsb. This kind of information is gold-dust and would make an ideal discussion for NAACE, provided we can complete it of course…

…so please help!

Belated thoughts on BETT 2010

Mr Portman — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:57:09 +0000

It’s coming up for a month since BETT 2010, and a few days off work sick gives me the opportunity to gather my thoughts…

Without doubt, Microsoft had the most impact for me. They seemed to have more prominent stands this year, in the prime spaces on the ground floor, near the centre. What struck me? Their vision of cloud computing for education, named live@edu, and the fact they were actively encouraging people to use Office 2010 beta.

So, what is live@edu? It’s a free resource provided by Microsoft for educational institutions. With it you get student email, access to collaborative Microsoft tools like Office Live, help with keeping students’ data private, 25GB of online storage per student and a few other things.

I’m excited by it because I see it as the ideal future for the VLE. It’s free, which is very desirable considering the potential cutbacks to education funding due to the recession, and, it’s secure, something which concerns me with the VLEs procured by LAs in England. Then, purely from a learning point-of-view, it’d be exposing children to real applications rather than products designed to mimic such applications in a school environment (although that’s probably only relevant in KS1 and KS2).

I noticed 2009 brought some changes to Microsoft’s attitude towards Beta testing. I don’t know how they did it before, but it seems they have been very positive in encouraging home and small business users to use beta versions of Windows 7. I downloaded it in July, for example. At BETT 2010, they were actively telling people to donwload the Office 2010 beta, although I’d actually done that in December.

Anyway, I really like Office 2010, and have no intention of going back to Open Office. Office 2010 just works, and we’ll happily pay for whatever licences we need come the Autumn when the beta runs out.

Typekit: not quite yet?

Mr Portman — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:51:38 +0000

I’d been struggling with a font for the post headings on my home page and wanted to try something different. Having experimented with Typekit on a concept site of mine (onX3), I thought I’d give it a go on Mr Portman.

Typekit allows you to use fonts on websites other than those already on people’s computers. Once registered, you setup a site, add a few lines of script in the element of your page, and you can then use these other fonts in your stylesheet.

I found a font I thought would work really well, called Adelle, so set it up and used it for my post headings. It worked within seconds, but wait…

…it looked awful! I was using Firefox at the time and the font was looking blocky (at 30px):

Perhaps it was the font-size? Here’s what it looks like at 18px, 16px and 14px:

So, I though I’d find out if it was just Firefox. I opened up IE8 (at 18px, 16px and 14px):

Hmmm. I then tried a few other fonts, but couldn’t find any I liked, so I can’t say whether it was just that font or Typekit itself. The fact it works fine on my other site, (onX3) suggests it might be the font. I finally settled for Arial:

I know even this doesn’t look perfect, but it’s a lot better than the others.

Using WordPress permalinks with localhost

Mr Portman — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:02:18 +0000

I’ve changed the permalink structure on this site, using the Settings tab. It automatically create a .htaccess file for you.

Today, I wanted to set up a fresh installation of this site on my local server, which is WAMP. It just wasn’t having it, so I looked into the WAMP settings. This would also work on other Apache bundles, I believe:

Open your httpd.conf and search for the following lines:

#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

…uncomment it (remove the hash), and:

Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order deny,allow
Deny from all

…making sure AllowOverride is set to All, as above. Sorted.

Why I don’t think WordPress makes a good CMS

Mr Portman — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:11:24 +0000

A quick Google for WordPress CMS reveals a lot of people seeing it as a real content management system (CMS). I beg to differ.

WordPress is a blogging platform. It was written to allow people to easily create and maintain a blog. With each release, new features are added and the excellent WordPress community combined with the ease of producing a plugin, means a hell of a lot of functionality exists for WordPress. But, and it’s a big butt, it was originally built as a bloggin platform, not as a CMS.

I’ve made considerable use of WordPress and experimented with it as a CMS, but it seems that every project I work on I find something else which causes me a pain. It’s not surprising: I’m using something intended as a blogging platform for a job it wasn’t designed to do.

Contrast this with a real CMS. I’ve used Expression Engine for numerous sites and it’s such a pleasure to work with. Like WordPress, there’s also a great community, but this time it’s working on something intended to be used as a CMS, so the resultant plugins are more relevant to what I’m doing. Everything just takes less time with Expression Engine.

But what about cost? For the price of an Expression Engine commercial licence, and the time it takes me to set-up a site using it, unless the site I’m building is something fairly straighforward, the labour involved in tweaking WordPress usually means I’m saving my clients money by using the former. That’s the bottom line.

WordPress plugin: More Fields

Mr Portman — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:08:04 +0000

What a little gem this is! Install it and you can set up a box on your write/edit pages with easily accessible custom fields which show all the time.

It makes WordPress a much more realistic proposition as a simple CMS.

Accessing custom field data in WordPress

Mr Portman — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:39:31 +0000

Custom fields add extra functionality to WordPress. They allow you to add a field and a value, then use that information for whatever you want. I’ve recently been working on a project which lists courses which can last several months, and I wanted to use custom fields to create Begin and End dates.

Despite the praise custom fields are getting, I didn’t think they were that easy to add to a post – for this particular project I was being very mindful of making things as simple for the client as possible. However, I found a solution for that in a plugin called More Fields, reviewed elsewhere on this site.

Anyway, another problem with custom fields is that they are stored as a string. This I found to be a real pain. Let’s say I save a Begin date of 22/02/2010 and another of 16/04/2010. If I want to compare these using the standard WP syntax for custom fields:

query_posts(‘meta_key=miles&meta_compare=<=&meta_value=22′);

…it doesnt work! Why? Because it’s a string. That means 22/02/2010 is higher than 16/04/2010! That’s a pity, because it meant I couldn’t use the meta_compare within the query_posts tag. Instead, I had to extract the custom fields with the WP loop, as so:

$beginDate = get_post_meta($post->ID, “Begins”, true);
$endDate = get_post_meta($post->ID, “Ends”, true);

$postMonths = get_months($beginDate, $endDate);

The above code shows the Begins and Ends custom fields being extracted into variables before being passed into a function I talk about elsewhere.

Creating a list of the next six months using PHP

Mr Portman — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:14:55 +0000

For a recent project, I needed to create a list of the next six months in the sidebar on a WordPress site. Visitors would then select one of these months and be shown a list of courses which were running that month.

It all sounds fairly straightforward, but there were a few problems: one with PHP’s date function and another with the fact that some of the courses would span several months and the client was happy for visitors to drop in on the classes whenever they liked.

PHP’s date function problem

My original plan was to use the following within a WHILE loop to create a list of the next six months:

echo date(‘F Y’, strtotime(‘+1 month’));

…but I was finding it would sometimes miss out a month. What the date function does is add an arbitrary number of days (which it thinks is a month) to the present date, rather than just add a month. So, if the date was 31^st January, it would add 31 days and end up in March, thereby missing February! In the end I came up with the following:

$count = 0;

while ($count <= 5) {

$thisMonth = date(‘n’);

$monthNum = $thisMonth[0] + $count;

$monthNameAndYear = date(“F Y”, mktime(0, 0, 0, $monthNum, 10));

echo “
”;

echo $monthNameAndYear;

echo “
\n”;

$count++;

}

So, what it does is get the number of the today’s month, add the $count variable to it and use the result in another date() function using the mktime() function. The count tops out at five, limiting the list to the next six months of the year.

Courses spanning several months

Several methods failed me before I moved onto this one. Basically, if the courses only lasted for a day, I could’ve edited the post date and shown future dates and that would’ve been no problem. And again, if they had only lasted two months I could’ve had some custom fields and just checked the starting month and the finishing month. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite so simple if you’ve got more months in between. Fortunately, I managed to find this somewhere on the web (apologies for not crediting you if you’re the author – if you contact me I’ll make sure I do):

function get_months($beginDate, $endDate) {

$beginDate = explode(“/”,$beginDate);

$reverseBeginDate = $beginDate[2] . “/” . $beginDate[1] . “/” . $beginDate[0];

$endDate = explode(“/”,$endDate);

$reverseEndDate = $endDate [2] . “/” . $endDate [1] . “/” . $endDate [0];

$time1 = strtotime($reverseBeginDate );

$time2 = strtotime($reverseEndDate );

$my = date(‘mY’, $time2);

$months = array(date(‘F’, $time1));

while($time1 < $time2) {

$time1 = strtotime(date(‘Y-m-d’, $time1).’ +1 month’);

if(date(‘mY’, $time1) != $my && ($time1 < $time2))

$months[] = date(‘F’, $time1);

}

$months[] = date(‘F’, $time2);

return $months;

}

…I have edited the code slightly, but essentially you give it two dates and it tells you all the months in between. All I had to do then was check the array in the template for the presence of whatever month visitors were after. Bish, bash, bosh!

Finding the category of a post within the WordPress loop

Mr Portman — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:01:07 +0000

I’d read somewhere that to get the category of a post you used this within the loop:

$post->post_category

…but for some reason this wasn’t returning anything. After a while looking for a solution, I went for an alternative method using the function:

get_the_category()

It complicates the issue slightly, while adding power, by returning the category of a post as an array. Then, each category has it’s own array of credentials, such as id, name and so on. As I knew there was only going to be one category attached to my posts, and I was only texting for a category anyway, for this project I ended up with this:

$cat = get_the_category();

if ($cat[0]->name) {

The Suitcase Kid by Jacqueline Wilson

Mr Portman — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:15:36 +0000

Now, I know this looks like a book for girls, but it isn’t. Not just for girls anyway. I read it to the whole class last year and everyone loved it. And the girls brought in their own copy and read along as well!

Some teachers don’t like Jacqueline Wilson’s writing style, which is really chatty. I think that as I long as you learn when a chatty writing style is okay, and when it isn’t, why shouldn’t you sometimes write like Jacqueline Wilson! You could do a lot worse!

Anyway, I’d heard The Suitcase Kid was a really good read and that it dealt with an issue a lot of children face nowadays: parents getting divorced. The story centres on ten-year-old Andy, whose parents have split up and moved in with other people. No longer living in her idyllic Mulberry Cottage, Andy now lives out of her suitcase – one week with Mum’s new family and the next week with Dad’s.

It’s a lovely story which deals with a lot of the emotions and troubles experienced by children whose parents are separated or separating.

I’d recommend this to any child in Y5 or Y6. Although I can’t see many boys reading it (the publishers changing the cover, might help), I would encourage them to do so if experiencing problems at home, and all girls will probably like it. I think it is a great book to read to a class. For children, I think Y5/Y6 would be the ideal age and girls, in particular. Strong readers in Y4 might also enjoy it.

****~ (4/5)