investigating Alert tools for Administrators who need help from technical assistants

I am cross-posting my own comment from the Documentation section on managing Skins. The suggestion for an alert tool is made at the end of this long comment.




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PJ Matthews, Kyoto
Migrated from Ning 2.0. Now at Jamroom 6 beta and using Jamroom Hosting for The Research Cooperative (researchcooperative.org)
updated by @researchcooperative: 01/11/17 03:57:46AM

I'm not the Jr Team... they can respond better, but perhaps I can help in some way:
I can't follow all your notes above, too complex for my brain...lol, but...

1) Keep a copy of your Ningja skin that is the original JR version, not tweaked by you, but kept updated with every new JR Ningja update that comes along. Every time Jamrrom issues an update to the Ningja skin, YES apply that update to your Ningja skin and it will only update your ningja skin, the update will NOT go into any clonedcustom skin you've made, renamed, and customized.
2) after the update, use the Compare tool to see the update code difference between your previous Ningja skin version and the newly updated version of Ningja- that will SHOW you the exact section of update code. The JR description should tell you what the new update does and you can then decide if you wantto apply that update to your Custom skin or not.
3) if you DO want it for your custom skin (a bug fix or a cool new added feature for example) then using what you did in 1) you can copy the update code and apply it to your custom skin code. To be smart, you can FIRST make another Clone of your custom skin for safety and apply the update to it to see if you like what the update does or if it creates a problem. if you don't like what the update did you can just delete that test clone.


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

Thanks.

So far the only Compare tool I have seen is built into the templates workspace inside a module or skin (I will call it Internal-Compare).

Is there another Compare tool for comparing a native JR module or skin with a cloned module or skin (i.e. Cross-Compare)?

In my case, I am working with the purchased native JR modules, none of them cloned, and a cloned skin, so I might need a Cross-Compare tool for comparing my cloned skin with the updated native JR skin.


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PJ Matthews, Kyoto
Migrated from Ning 2.0. Now at Jamroom 6 beta and using Jamroom Hosting for The Research Cooperative (researchcooperative.org)

I'm not understanding- I have no trouble in the regular Compare function in comparing my custom skin to, for example, any version of the JR Ningja skin (incuding a newly updated one). Can you describe exactly what you're trying to do?


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

I compare directories and sites often, usually within my text editor (BBEdit) although there are many standalone tools which will perform that task well.

You are probably going to want to do the comparison on your localhost site and then upload your changes to your server.


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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Education, learning resources, TEL, AR/VR/MR, CC licensed content, panoramas, interactive narrative, sectional modules (like jrDocs), lunch at Uni of Bristol. Get in touch if you share my current interests or can suggest better :)

Thanks everyone. I will study this further as time permits, and call this thread "investigating" for now.

I have only seen and used one kind of comparison tool, for comparing the default and modified .tpl files within a single skin.

I am very nervous about touching anything at this level, in part because of my inability to keep track of updates and their implications for changes I might have made (and which I will certainly not remember in my head) (and I don't have time to troll through code looking for changes and issues).

Hence my interest in some kind of monitoring tool that can send out technical alerts tailored to my own site, and that can be forwarded to my dreamed-of personal technical assistant


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PJ Matthews, Kyoto
Migrated from Ning 2.0. Now at Jamroom 6 beta and using Jamroom Hosting for The Research Cooperative (researchcooperative.org)
updated by @researchcooperative: 10/10/16 05:18:59AM

There are technical tools available that allow their users to understand what has changed in a codebase over time.

The jamroom team uses "Git". Its a tool for programmers though, there is no interface for it in jamroom ACP beyond the compare tool on the TEMPLATES tab.

These types of tools have a common name of "revision control systems" and there are many flavors.

I hesitate to recommend them though, I suspect they would cause you more confusion that the benefit they give.