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August 31, 2007
Discussion on the new KALX Promotions web form
I thought we could discuss the new KALX Promotions web form here without filling people's inboxes who don't want to listen to this conversation.
Let's collect all of the feature requests or problems with the existing form here at which point Tom can decide what he wants me to implement. Here are the current problems and feature requests that have been passed around on the email thread. Feel free to comment on this thread.
Current Problems
- Problem : Russ Blackmar : This new form makes me fill in the name of the club, address and the other stuff every time.
- Feature Request : Meredith : Gotta agree with Russ on the annoyance of having to fill in the club info every time. What about a drop down to select your club, and auto populating address info?
- Potential Solution : Gene Wood : How about this for a solution. I'll make an option that lets you save the Venue information, so you enter it once and save it. From that point on when you go to the form, instead of filling everything in, you select from your saved Venues and it populates the values, at which point you can put in the band and the dates.
- Problem : Russ Blackmar : Clicking back once the PDF is created doesn't retain the field values that have been entered
- Potential Solution : Gene Wood : I can make the form return to the first form page when the PDF is created, pre-populated with the values. This wouldn't however re-populate the DJ Names and DJ Dates on the second form page.
- Problem : Sherry : Please adjust the form so that I can put in a range of dates and specify any show, as that's how we do the movie giveaways. Or if I can leave it blank that'd be fine as well.
- Potential Solution : I've changed the form to allow blank fields in the interim. If we want to allow ranges, Tom will need to come up with what he wants that to be represented as in the PDF that's created. Once that's set, I can implement a parser to accept date ranges.
Resolved Problems
- Problem : Russ Blackmar : I like to fill in the names of the dj's to to giveaway the tix when I'm at the station, using the dj schedule by the air studio. This new form means I either have to use the schedule on the website or I have to fill out the whole form while I'm at the station
- Feature Request : Michael Lubenow : It would be nice to be able to leave the DJ assignment slots blank instead of it filling in ANY automatically
- Potential Solution : Gene Wood : I can change the interface so the options for putting in DJ Names are "Any", "something you type in", or blank.
- Solved : I've implemented the solution I described on 10/20/2007.
- Problem : Russ Blackmar : This new form doesn't allow for the date "Now"
- Potential Solution : Gene Wood : I can remove the date validation check so that it accepts whatever text you want to put in there.
- Solved : I've implemented the solution I described on 10/20/2007.
- Problem : Sherry : Yesterday it would time out before I could get to the form at all, and today I've tried to do a test three times and it's not working.
- Potential Solution : Gene Wood : Sherry, I'm not sure what caused this, if you can send me more details I can determine what happened. Has it continued to happen? While this is happening can you reach other websites like google? Has anyone else experienced this problem?
- Closed : I haven't been able to reproduce this and nobody else has seen this problem occur again.
- Problem : Carol Harris : Computers are not the do-all/say-all as everyone thinks. you should handwrite yours, too!
- Problem : Carol Harris : I'm just putting my two cents in for a third option than the promo forms or this on line one -- and that's a Word template
- Gene Wood : What functionality would a Word template provide which is not available in the web form?
- Closed : Sherry clarified that the functionality that she needs are the storage of venue information that Russ requested, and the ability to leave fields blank which I've implemented.
- Problem : Michael O'Connell : My biggest objection is the mono-appearance of the resulting giveaway sheet which is probably unavoidable unless we had font choices and type sizes so that we could emphasize or de-emphasize certain info or get more into certain areas like the description.
- Gene Wood : This limitation in the variableness of the giveaway sheets was the intent of this project. This is to make all of the giveaway forms look the same so DJs have an easier time parsing them.
- Closed : Not going to fix
Posted by gene_wood at August 31, 2007 10:53 AM
Comments
My first problem's solved, thanks.
I currently use a template, and the funtionality it provides is as follows:
1. the variables that never change stay the same -- 21 plus, wheelchair accessible, address, venue, etc.
2. I can leave things blank and then complete the form later. Sometimes I type in band names, sometimes I handwrite them. I ALWAYS assign my tickets at the station.
3. If this webform is adjusted to auto fill and we have the option of leaving fields blank I'm willing to adjust. I've not played around enough with it to figure out if all the fields require entry, but I tried to do one without a time and I got an error message.
4. But to play devil's advocate I'm comfortable with using a template, and I like the idea of a third option in case there are ever technical problems with the web form. If the resultant giveaway sheet is virtually identical whether done as this kind of form or a Word Document template with fields, what does it matter?
Posted by: Sherry Sly at August 31, 2007 08:09 PM
Hey all sorry for the unavailability of this forum over the weekend. A number of events (mac truck driving into a power substation where the server is hosted, me being out of town, etc.) conspired to cause this to be unavailable. It's back up now.
Posted by: gene ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://cs.cementhorizon.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 4, 2007 04:39 PM
hey - is this thing on? ha ha
anyway, i like the form for the most part. one more thing i'd like to add though - when i'm all done with the form, and it goes to print, it shows me what the sheet will look like, which is cool. but invariably i'll see that i made a mistake! and then i have to go back and fix the mistake, but usually all the info gets erased when i hit the back button. so i have to re-type all the stuff i just put in (fortunately it does do the auto-fill thing). it would be nicer if everything was "saved" so i when i hit the back button it's all still there, and all i have to do is change the error.
FYI - i noticed that sometimes both the dj names page AND the show info page are both erased when i hit the back button, and other times it's just the dj names page that's erased. don't know why that is...
anyway, thanks guys!
russ
Posted by: russ at September 13, 2007 03:51 PM
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