This week I had planned on finishing the scheduling wizard, but I noticed the catalog search feature was not returning all the intended results. After looking into this issue, I determined that the search was only utilizing the course title to fetch results and not utilizing the index I created using “graduation requirements” taxonomy (e.g., mathematics, science, etc). So, for example, when the user searched for “math”, it would not return math classes like “AP Calculus” because “math” is not part of the title. After exploring Drupal’s Search API documentation, I was able to remedy this issue by explicitly mapping an index to the taxonomy’s description rather than the taxonomy object itself.

I also spent a bit of time diving deeper into theming in Drupal, which is a bit less straight forward than writing CSS. In Drupal, you can use Twig files–template files that have an inheritance hierarchy. I was able to refine the appearance of my main web application with a mixture of custom Twig files and CSS.

I also created custom Twig files and CSS for the custom module that drives the Scheduling Wizard.

I have also resumed work n the logic of the Scheduling Wizard, which I hope to be finished with before the end of the working week so I can begin usability testing this weekend. What has slowed me down in this aspect is that there seem to be so many ways of doing one thing in Drupal and it can be challenging to find well-documented examples (and weeding through ones that may be deprecated).