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©2006-2010 Intermission - www.ItsTheIntermission.com. All Rights Reserved.

©2006-2010 Intermission - www.ItsTheIntermission.com. All Rights Reserved.

I did a little review this week on the submissions I made this year, and in that process revamped my tracking system. It’s not just because I’m a data geek that I feel it’s important to track submissions. Once upon a time, I sent a submission out to a place I’d already sent one to some months before. The theatre had a strict policy of only one submission per twelve-month period. My submission was shredded. No matter how nice they were about it, I was embarrassed by my mistake. What an amateur…

And so, I keep track of the scripts I send out. I used to design databases for a living, and while I enjoyed that for a long time, it was work. There’s nothing fun about creating some complicated system for personal use. Well, sometimes. Except I’m too busy. So, off the shelf software was where I began.

I used to use software called Power Tracker than ran on OS9. I received it as a freebie the first time I bought Screenwriter in a very early iteration of that software. Power Tracker was built to track screenplay submissions, and handled stage play submissions, too. I chugged along with that until Apple abandoned OS9, and I needed some other way to track my submissions. I remembered we had a copy of FileMaker Pro somewhere. The Beloved had won a copy of it in a raffle at MacWorld some time ago.

Bento is a neat, cheap, and unsophisticated data management tool.

With FileMaker I went a little overboard designing reports for myself. I like slicing and dicing information in every which way. The only problem with FP really was it was at least two versions old, and not supported by Leopard. FileMaker 7 crashes in Leopard. Some days, FP7 crashes a lot. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to spend nearly a couple of hundred bucks to upgrade, when I only use FP for my little tracking program.

Excel is a great option. MBH uses Excel, I think, to track his submissions. Very easy to sort, group, see what you’ve done. I thought about that. And then I downloaded the trial version of Bento.

Bento is not FileMaker lite. It’s hardly a database. Yet, I think Bento may be my new solution to my script tracking. If not, I’ll just move over to a spreadsheet, and keep an even simplier list.

Within about an hour, I transferred my data from FileMaker into Bento, and using it in conjunction with Address Book, and iCal, I got back to not thinking about software.

How I set Bento up:

My data is now found in these places…

• Submission places (theatres, grants, festivals, workshops, etc.) are kept in Address Book.
• Submission deadlines (for festivals, workshops, competitions) are kept in iCal
• A list of “projects” or scripts is contained in a Bento table.
• A list of submissions made is contained in a Bento table.

Within my Bento, the primary table and display form, is the list of submissions, or the “what’s been submitted” info. That table is linked to the Address Book, which holds the “submitted to where” info. The submissions table is also linked to the Bento projects/scripts table.

A secondary table, or display form, is a list of upcoming deadlines for things I might want to submit something to. This form contains some Bento fields so that I know if I have made a submission to this.

In an ideal database world, the Deadlines table/form would be able to automatically link data to the Scripts Submitted table/form when I click on “Submission Sent.” Bento doesn’t do this type of task. The deadlines table does not contain the theatre name or the dates associated with it. These two data items exist in iCal alone, and Bento doesn’t allow more sophisticated manipulating among Bento tables or forms. There is no Apple script for Bento, or programming code in Bento. A downside of this psuedo-linking is that I cannot search on the theatre name because the theatre name is stored in iCal, or, for the Scripts Submitted form, stored in Address Book. That’s just silly, and I suspect Bento will add that searching feature along with a few other features in the next version.

Below, are three screen shots that pretty much tell you everything about how I’m looking at the data. That’s it. Not as simple as Excel, but simple nonetheless. No special reports. Just a screen display, arrowing through the records.

The danger in looking at a product like Bento is that if you want a database, Bento is not for you. Even though you can attach Address Book and iCal to Bento, and manipulate these sources, Bento is not a true relational database product. If you need a lot of scripts, data sorts, reports and all that good stuff, again, a word of caution that Bento is not for you. I see a lot of folks trying to make Bento into a kind of cheap FileMaker Pro. That’s a lot like trying to turn a hard boiled egg into an souffle.

Bento currently costs $49. It only runs on Leopard.

©2006-2010 Intermission - www.ItsTheIntermission.com. All Rights Reserved.

intermission.typepad.com

also known as

writing the play

The typepad account has been closed!

©2006-2010 Intermission - www.ItsTheIntermission.com. All Rights Reserved.

It bears oft repeating: read the WordPress Codex at Codex.WordPress.org

I hope this is obvious: The WordPress software must be installed on your server. The software comprises a lot of PHP scripts, some CSS and JavaScript files, and MySQL databases. The database aspect of WordPress, and blogging software, is what provides blogging its flexibility and instant publishing abilities. Your posts or pages are stored in a database. The old-fashioned HTML websites required your post, if you will, embedded in HTML code and then republished somehow to the web each and every time you edited your post. That’s a very clunky, very platform dependent way of publishing. With blogging software, generally you are creating or editing a database record which is then instantly displayed and formatted by your blog theme. Anywho… you can install the WordPress software and never touch it, except to update the software as needed. If you’re a little geeky like me, you might want to know more about the “core” of WordPress, and I’ll write a bit about my explorations of it in future posts.

A WordPress theme is what manages your site’s design. A WordPress theme is made up of several components: a style sheet (at least one, you can have more if you must), template files, functions, and images. Plug-ins are optional.

The style sheet is a CSS file which controls the fonts, the paragraphs, the formatting of your posts and site design. In the short time I’ve revamped Intermission, I’ve learned a great deal more about CSS and creating style sheets, and so I’ll be making adjustments to this site, or more precisely my style.css file, in order to make posts easier to read. Useful troubleshooting tools for CSS and XHTML code are the W3C CSS and the W3C XHTML Validators. (The only pages on Intermission that will not validate properly are posts with videos embedded. That’s another story…)

Template files are PHP script files. The PHP files generate the HTML and access the MySQL database for posts, pages, and whatever site information is needed. (All that WordPress dashboard stuff is stored in an MySQL table.) In theory, you only need an index.php template file, and a style.css. Ideally, you have at least the index.php, a header.php, and a footer.php. When you view a WordPress blog, the following files are called and put together to form the page you see: header.php, index.php, and footer.php.

The header.php, of course, contains the HTML or XHTML or DHTML or whatnotHTML header references (for compliant web design). Also the code for your header are included here. Thus, Intermission’s header.php contains my graphic, the website title information. The menu system, the quotation space, and the search box are also contained in the header.php because that’s where I wanted them, or where I found they worked best. Most sites would include these latter items in the index.php or sidebar.php.

The index.php contains the WordPress “loop.” A loop is a “do while” or “for” somethingorother piece of PHP code. For WordPress, you are telling PHP to do something as long as there are posts to display. In Intermission’s case, the loop displays the most recent post in full, and then the next 11 posts in extract form. If you use sidebars for various navigation items, the sidebar.php is called from the index.php. Intermission does not use sidebars except on the “About” pages.

The footer.php contains anything you want displayed in the footer. Usually this contains the name of your theme, any acknowledgements, copyright, and hosting stuff. You can put whatever you want displayed at the bottom of your pages in the footer.

You can include other template files for specific looks to pages, single posts, search, archives, etc. An exploration of how WordPress calls template files can help you determine what additional looks you want or need. The Codex has a great graphic representation of the template hierarchy.

Intermission includes single.php, pages.php, search.php, archives.php, and sidebar.php. Single.php is called when you click on an individual post. It works in conjunction with the header.php and footer.php. The pages.php and sidebar.php make up, along with the header.php and footer.php, the “About” pages of Intermission. Search.php formats the search results (if you type something in the Search input box and press the enter key…), and the archives.php formats the archive pages of the site. Finally, Intermission includes a 404.php template file for the displaying of an error message if a page you click on cannot be found.

Functions can be included in the theme, contained in an optional functions.php file. A function is a task specific piece of PHP code. Or… you can make use of WordPress Plug-ins. Plug-ins are written by the WordPress geek community, and contain PHP code, or PHP with a combination of JavaScript and/or Ajax code. Currently Intermission makes use of several useful plug-ins, which are listed on the Site Design page. For example, the Coffee House Wall uses a plug-in specific to allowing comments on a single page. I hope to write my own plug-ins as the new site evolves. I think learning to use PHP within WordPress helped me to make smarter choices in including WordPress Plug-ins. Not all plug-ins, nor are all themes, are coded well.

These posts will get geekier as they go along…next up will be a dissection of the MySQL tables.

No timeline on these, just goals for posts.

The next post, probably next week, will return to Thoughts on Developing Plays.

©2006-2010 Intermission - www.ItsTheIntermission.com. All Rights Reserved.