Comments from Development Team for Future Projects

-----Original Message----- From: FRASER Mairi Sent: 25 September 2012 16:57 To: MACCALMAN Miles Cc: CONLON Stephen Subject: ITS098 - Feedback

Hi Miles,

As discussed at last week's UWS meeting, feedback on the issue with the Content References field is as follows:

-- There is a Polopoly-specific equivalent to our custom Content References field.  If Support were investigating further the issue with the Content References field for which we now have a workaround, they may wish to investigate using the Polopoly version of this widget instead.  We haven't looked into this in any detail; we are only aware that it exists and that it would appear to provide similar functionality to our own version.  If we had any issues with this widget (i.e. similar slowness when it's used to that experienced following the DB upgrade), we would then presumably have recourse to Polopoly Support.

-- Regarding the general comments made around the table as to the limited usefulness of the Content References page for articles in Polopoly, we should try to quantify that.  Is there a pattern?  If we are not aware of a pattern, is it possible to do some testing to find a pattern?  There are a finite number of ways in which content can be referenced in Polopoly so we ought to be able to narrow the problem down to specific scenarios.  Obviously, if we separately determine that the Polopoly Content References field could replace our version, this problem should go away.

These comments are specific to the workaround that Richard put in place for Content References, and are not really concerned with the slowness issues that were experienced on the database.  On that subject, I agree with what was said at the meeting last week - it's important to close the project as the Polopoly database has been upgraded, however we should revisit this during any future upgrade work.  I would recommend that as part of any future Polopoly database upgrade, assuming our workaround in the Content References area is still in place, we switch off this workaround and check whether the slowness problem still exists in the media bank.  If we refresh TEST from LIVE before performing the upgrade, as per the recommendations coming out of the ITS098 project, we should be able to reproduce the problem, if it still exists, in the TEST environment without any impact on LIVE.  At that point, we can make a call as to whether to leave the workaround in place, or look for a more permanent solution.

Cheers,

Mairi