P2Rx Web group met on a call March 27, 2008.  Nate Bisbee and  Andy Bray (NEWMOA), Thomas Edgerton and Curt McCracken (WRRC), Zac Fowler (P2RIC), Wes Fleming (Peaks), John Hanzo (WRPPN), Prabin Kanel (PPRC), Jean Waters (P2Rx) and Beth Anderson (EPA) were on the call.

We began with introductions, where all participants provided some information about their technical abilities, interest, and responsibilities for web work

Nate has been at NEWMOA about two and a half years.  He’s been the P2Rx programmer this past year.  He learned cold fusion after getting to NEWMOA.  He is very familiar with Java or C++.

Andy has been at NEWMOA for about 11 years.  He has been the programmer for NEWMOA but has turned much of it over to Nate.  Andy was a primary architect for many of the P2Rx products (Topic Hubs, Programs Directory, Mercury Reduction Programs database, etc.).

Tom Edgerton has been at WRRC about a year and a half.  He is primarily in charge of the site’s best reference section and review of documents for databases.  He is a chemist by training and has worked for 38 years on environmental issues.  He also handles the “Ask Rudy” and other technical questions.

Curt is with WRRC and the North Carolina Division of Pollution Prevention and Environmental Assistance (DPPEA). He came to this group about eight years ago and got thrown into the computer fire.  Curt takes care of html and some coding but isn’t a real programmer.  David Web is new LAN guy just hired at NC DPPEA.

Zac Fowler has been working on P2RIC a bit less than a year.  The language he primarily uses is php and mysequel but uses cold fusion for P2RIC.  Zac manages a group of IT students at UNO in a laboratory setting known as “The Attic.” 

Wes Fleming has been with Peaks and Prairies for about 2 months.  He is starting to get idea of P2Rx.  He has done a lot of front-end coding and some back end with php or pearl or cold fusion.  He has done a lot of game development using actionscript for flash program.

John at WRPPN will manage the student worker.  He has taken flash and html so can read it but no student worker right now.

Prabin is working for PPRC part-time.  He has been with P2Rx for four years. 

Beth Anderson is the EPA headquarters person responsible for this overall grant program.

Jean Waters is located with P2RIC and is the current program coordinator for P2Rx.

Currently every center has the Topic Hub database on their site.  These are all being managed the same way but each center has slightly different displays.  If we want to add any functionality, it has to be done in eight places.  In improve efficiency, we want to have one database and provide the data in xml format so all the centers can display it.  When we started discussing this some people were somewhat hesitant.  A primary concern was what if the server that has the database goes down?  We consolidated the Programs Directory and backed up the database on WRRC’s server.  We succeeded on this and now want to do a similar thing for the Topic Hubs.

All the centers have the same administrative interface for the Topic Hubs, so that won’t change.  Peaks and PPRC want to share topic hubs with external partners, too.  We have some of the core functionalities for centralization completed but some pieces need to be finished.  Nate & Andy will finish developing the web services, set up beta test area, demonstrate it, and then it should be ready to go.  There are two main parts – the web services to transmit the data and software to display it on the partners site.

We want to make it really easy to display the topic hubs for partners but the details of display haven’t been exactly worked out

Jean asked the centers to consider a basic display design we could all use.  Some sites have left-hand navigation or bread crumbs or other considerations that may make it difficult for one display scheme to work for every center.  We don’t want it to be too complicated, though.  We need a basic design.  Then if people want to get fancy they can do it on their own dime. NEWMOA opts out the display of Topic Hubs from the rest of their site.  Wes says breadcrumbs would be OK if we want to do it.  We have it for programs directory.

The individual center that authored the Topic Hub will still be responsible for checking links monthly on that hub.

Prabin said the Where to go for help should have web service, too.

John said he needs help when they hire someone new – he’ll contact Jean off line.

Jean will send out an e-mail to the group regarding schedule of quarterly web calls.  Wes generally works Monday and Tuesday all day plus Thursday mornings from 9:00 – 1:00 MT.  Prabin prefers calls over the lunch hour ET.  Andy isn’t available on the second Thursday of the month.  Jean will propose a quarterly schedule on the fourth Thursday at noon ET, 11:00 CT, 10:00 MT, 9:00 PT.