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GLOBE Website Enhancements Continue With Impactful Additions

Oct 01, 2012

The new GLOBE website continues to evolve with meaningful enhancements. To amplify this point, the GLOBE Program Office (GPO) technology team, in conjunction with our partners at Raytheon Web Services, has created a photo upload link in the data entry pages for community members who are participating in the Climate and Land Cover (CLC) Intensive Observing Period (IOP), which runs from 1-31 October. These links will store your photos, which will be available on the new GLOBE visualization system in the future. Photos submitted before July 2012 are currently available through the new visualization system.

On a parallel track, the GLOBE community has played an integral role in many of the enhancements to the website. Below you will find a sampling of key enhancements. We have them listed by subject area for easier reading. In addition, the community is encouraged to visit the news section of the GLOBE website for the latest information regarding which protocols are being turned on and off as GPO technical is in the process of migrating science data from the old database to the new database during the (ongoing) preparation for enhanced capabilities in the new visualization system and the modernized data entry system that is currently in development.

Key Website Enhancements

Community Map

Removed "center your org map on this lat/long" fields from partners and school organizations. This lat/long functionality is not needed for partners and schools because it is primary for regions and countries to identify the center point on their map while schools and partner map location is based on their organization address.
When viewing members using the "list view" –– only two columns will now be displayed (name & organization). This will eliminate members from being listed multiple times if they belong to multiple organizations. When sorting by organization, only the default organizations can be sorted. It is important to note that the functionality to define a default organization will be available in the next release.
Changing of the "list view" functionality: In "table view" if the user selects a different member type (e.g. teacher, trainer, etc.), the list will change to reflect the selection, instead of needing to go back to the map view first.
Fixed a Liferay bug where "table view" showed zero results for partners when the map was dragged to the right.

Workshops

Modification to workshops page: The "restrictions" field displays instead of "additional comments" on the workshop detail page. This modification is a direct result of community input.
Modifications to workshop roster: If someone is added to a roster through the "workshop administration" interface e.g. add teacher to roster, they now receive an email notification that they have been added. As with the modification to the workshops page, this change will assist partners in managing their workshops properly by adding a level of assurance for participants.
Modified the registration process to prevent students from registering for workshops.

Administration / Control Panel

Users now have the ability to flag images and videos as inappropriate. Email notifications are sent to the help desk.
In the profile/GLOBE information, trainers and members can identify the languages they speak through a series of checkboxes. If any language is selected, it will also appear on their "MyPage" under "send email."
Users associated with multiple organizations now have the ability, under their "My Account" to select their primary (or default) organization. This will be reflected in their "MyPage" map and in the table view of the community map (default organization will be listed first). This feature was also enhanced to allow anyone with administration rights for a user account to also be able select the default organization.

Forms / Email Notifications

Text verification: There is now a more straightforward "CAPTCHA" form for text and audio.
Fixed a bug with Create an Account where users could add an invalid school name in the School Name field.

Website Fixes

Created a site definition category under each investigation area for workshop creation form. Also added protocols to category list.
Events calendar added. It now defaults to the month view and lists all GLOBE event titles on the calendar. The titles link to the event detail page.
Member listing portlet: Users now have the ability to click "show all" and can scroll through the complete list of members versus just viewing five at a time.

Website fixes: visualization

Site photos – added ability to view site photos (land cover only at this time).
Fixed gaps missing in time plots.
Plot script error – Plotting a data range greater than 5 years may cause the system to time out. Changed the default to a 1000 points max and gave the user the ability to define a plot time range.
Time scale for plots is shorter than actual data. User can now also select the date range.
Default plot option now matches the protocol selected on the map.
Resolved issue where the website window didn't display for some sites on map and fixed a system bug when filtering by school (the pull-down menu of previously selected search results remained when doing a new site search).
Added progress bar for data table and plots.
Improved plot colors by changing to primary and secondary colors.
Fixed bug where school info window was not opening when all cloud layers are added.
Snow pack PH and depth layer icons now display.
Fixed bugs to ensure the website information window opens entirely.
Added elevation to the export layer data.
Change functionality to open the legend whenever a layer is added.

Coming Soon …

The bulk upload of 25,000 users and their training data is still finishing the test phase. Because this process involves a significant number of users and considerable amounts of data, GPO technical is taking every precaution to ensure the process runs smoothly. GPO technical will release a more updated timeline as soon as the test phase is complete.