Re: php patch

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- M Elzubeir <zubeir at gmail dot com> wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 17:03:48 -0700 (PDT), Nadim Shaikli
> > I highly recommend you deploy this, in a phantom dir if you like, and have
> > a few of us use it.  Once all looks fine and we can verify that the count
> > is being done correctly, things are being saved properly, mails are being
> > sent, errors are being caught, etc (ie. post some serious testing), we can
> > go live with it.  The testing db and contents post testing will simply be
> > discarded.
> 
> Already have:
>   http://www.arabeyes.org/~elzubeir/www/

OK, I did a bit of snooping in the code - the web resulted in your previous
comments and here is what I've come up with so-far (I hand edited the mysql
data entries to get it to result in some data :-).  I really doubt Omar can
remedy all these issues and so its M.Elzubeir and I on this from here on in
so we can deploy this mechanism on the 14th,

 1. All date checks internally should happen using the UTC timezone
    (are there day spill issue - hope not).
 2. There is an 'opendate' which gets checked in nominate.php yet its
    not set anywhere --> not sure of the intent of the variable, but I'd
    guess since we have a start_date and end_data (for nominations I'm
    guessing) this variable could be more aptly renamed to vote_date.
 3. I think start_date and end_date are there for the actual election day
    event, not sure why there is a multi-day span (future thinking ?),
    do we really need it as such ?
 4. Rename (if I understood this correctly) start_date and end_date to
    nominate_date_start and nominate_date_end (or similar) if that makes
    since.
 5. Include a 'vote_date' (as noted above) as part of the election
    management page.
 6. There really should be a 'nominate yourself' link possibly in the
    'right menu' link on any valid election.
 7. All table entries should come up when one presses on the nominate and
    a status column should note 'open/closed' for each election in the table
    with open ones allowing checked people to nominate themselves.
 8. Make as many of the dates pull-down menus as possible (to ease entry).
 9. autoincrement (on id) is 3, should be 1
10. In the nominate yourself page, it should note a bit more details on when
    the deadlines (for nomination as well as the vote) are, etc.
11. In the nominate page, change 'Send nomination' to 'Enter Nomination'
12. Once a person enter him/herself as a nominee, one should be able to remove
    him/herself (or change their campaign plea, etc).  It would be best to
    include a link (per person) in the admin.php page (which lists all
    people on the bottom) so that people can click on their names and change
    things.
13. Prior to elections there needs to be a 'vote' or similar link so that
people
    can read the various nominee's campaign pleas (a list of all nominees and
    a link to each person's blurb that they entered).  This same link when the
    time is right on election day will let people vote.
14. There are 2 mysql tables (elections and votes) I might have missed the part
    when they kinda link to each other.  In other words, the votes should 
    include that particular elections id or similar so that we can have 
    multiple future elections.
15. start/end_date use the format yyyy-mm-dd_hh:mm whereas the opendate uses
    yyyy_mm_dd_hh:mm (is bug is apparent in the vote.php line 31/32)
16. The voting page didn't give one the option to read the various nominee's
    campaign plea/promises/blurb.
17. The email sent looks good except the 'date' field was not filled-in
18. I tried to regenerate the md5sum post getting the email and didn't know
    what to exclude - it might be a good idea to note "--vote begin" and
    "--vote end" (non-inclusive) and to use everything in between.  Don't
    use tabs either and instead rely on spaces (to ease the recreation of
    md5sum in case of cut-n-paste).
19. Oddly enough voter name was ' Shaikli' without any mention of my first
    name.  Ah, line 101/102 in vote.php is missing a 'u' in 'userinfo' :-)
20. It would be nice to tell people on the webpage (when the data is
    confirmed - ie. when mail is sent) the email address the mail was sent
    to in case people forget which email is in their preferences or better
    yet display it while they are voting and give 'em a chance to change it
    by linking to the people.php page.
21. Note sure about the usage of the 'open' variable.  Plus the > and <
    compares should really be = compare on vote_date.

As noted, these are my quickie observations - I think the majority of what is
needed is there (thanks Omar !!) and now we need to clean it up and really
integrate it.  M.Elzubeir let us know when that happens so that a number of
us can really test it (pay extra attention of attainability of all the modules
and links).

Salam.

 - Nadim


		
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