This Change Log should have been started several years back, but here it begins with changes in 2015. Note, items are buttons: click them to see full explanations.

CS Roo Changes 2015

Credit for this change goes to Felipe Volpatto and Jamie Ruiz. When you are logged onto a site with administrator status it is now possible to make immediate changes to entries in the progress page by clicking an 'edit' icon to the left of each entry.

CS Roo Changes 2016

One of the most important CS Roo features is the comma seperated variable format file that drives the display of the Progress Page. Getting the initial format, including date stamps, correct without auto-generating this file is extremely difficult. Hence, there is a page that auto-generates the file based upon how someone has constumized the course dates in the config.php file. Up until now someone had to log in as and admin user of the site to create a new one. This was meant to encourage setting up users, but backfired and just made life very hard on everyone. Now there is a adin key and all that is required to create a fresh empty progress csv files is to know and enter that key. As before, for a final safety lock the only way to make that file be read by CS Roo is to actually move it up out of the ztools subdirectory. Thus, even if some stranger starts making new files, while it wastes time and space, it does no other real damage

The support for logging onto a CS Roos site has been bouncing back and forth between functionality that only works on the CSU CS Department server based upon a protocol associated with the Checkin program and functionality that only works off a locally maintained file stored with each CS Roo based site. As of this version, CS Roo checks whether it is running on the public_server as defined in the config.php file and if so uses the CSU CS Checkin protocol. It otherwise defaults to a local form of authentication appropriate for a development, i.e. personal laptop, server.

Jamie Ruiz and I have jointly crafted a very simple .htaccess file now supplied with CS Roo that forces all access to be through SSL. In other words, regardless of wether a user or external link requests https, the apache server is directed through a rewrite rule to use https. This change reflects the reality that in 2016 all sites should be using https and Google in particular is reported to drop insecure sites in their rankings.

The code for creating new progress spreadsheets now issues (hopefully) more helpful feedback under common errors such as failure to move the file up out of the ztools sub-folder or failure to create a new spreadsheet because of unix permissons in the ztools sub-folder.