So I grabbed all the minutes that were available on both the AOL site and the Yahoo site. I ran them through some filters to clean up the code as best as i could, and come to find that I just can't get these pages to display decently at all. Drupal offers two methods of displaying text - the standard 'Filtered HTML' mode (the system is expecting just plain old text, and allows some minimal set of markup:


* Allowed HTML tags: a em strong cite code ul ol li dl dt dd
* Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
* Images can be added to this post.


The trouble is, the pages were never formatted the same way more than about four times, and there is no consistency across them at all for markup. I can't easily fit the various layouts into one single format without rewriting them all. At work, for instance, we have developed a document specification (much like MIL spec has) and all docs are written to meet that spec, right down to fonts used and spacing, etc. The easiest way to enforce this would be to create a template form for entering minutes here on the site, but I wouldn't want to force anyone to type the crap in online, that seems onerous. However the desire to impose some kind of order on the minutes / newsletter chaos is strong in me.

Most of the old minutes are filled with tables, breaks, paragraph marks, Microsoft word classes, ...the list goes on. It seems that the minutes are almost more trouble than they're worth, expect for the fact that they contain vital motions and votes that may someday be relevant to an as-yet unforeseen situation. I wondered briefly if they best idea might not be to create PDFs of all meeting minutes and attach them to a book entry for each year. That way the formatting is preserved and the minutes would not be editable. Problem with this approach is that the consistency of presentation (and subsequent searching of the docs for some piece of info) becomes a pain, though the Sencha can attach a file to a page if given the permissions to do so.

I also tried enabling full HTML to just use the existing HTML docs (which were mostly saved out of Word) with no good result. The minutes from AOL are all inside tables which means they can't go up as is. I manually removed all outer tables (using a progam which works on multiple docs at a time), but still results were lackluster for another reason (below):

Full HTML
* Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

but the presentation is not as expected because while Drupal says it's full HTML, it seems that it inserts line breaks and paragraph marks automatically which means if you have these elements sprinkled throughout your HTML coded, Drupal will add more, making the whole page look too spaced out and crappy.

Another option they give is PHP code (which can be dangerous to allow if you don't know what you're doing). However, this might provide another solution: If the minutes were stored as simple text files on the server some place, I could write a simple PHP include to well, include them. That's probably not an option since the Sencha wouldn't be able to submit them to the site directly.

Unfortunately, preserving some of the more atrocious formatting (like words colored green and red, and various hues of backgroundc colors) is hard to justify. The minutes would need to be reformatted, by hand anyway to get them into a readable state unless I just print them to PDF right off wherever they are living right now (AOL, Word, HTML, etc.). I guess this may be how I proceed since cleaning up the minutes has become a nightmare.

However, given more time, the book outline feature offers a compelling means of accomplishing this goal as well: If the minutes for each meeting were broken down into their components (What News, New Business, etc.) each as a page in the book, then formatting each becomes less of a problem. You would always do a page of a given type the same way, and you could always click 'printer ready version' for a quick printout of all the minutes or some subsection thereof. The Book feature is a very powerful tool and I'd hate to give it up for relatively useless PDFs.

Arrrgh - Maybe I'll try both and see which one is more friendly.