Extension:Mccp

 "MCCP" stands for "Metrology & Configuration Control Portal" 

What can this extension do?
Adds a collection of Special Pages which provide web-access to an external "Metrology & Configuration Control" database. These special pages allows for the secure, online management of equipment with special attention to:
 * Systems and Subsystems
 * Multiple facilities, sites, buildings, rooms and location nomenclature
 * Calibration and calibration recall cycles and histories
 * Association and tracking of procedures and checklists
 * Technical print ECO (engineering change order) Tracking
 * Instrument Lists for Testing
 * and, my favorite, (SRS) System Readiness Status tracking



=Introduction= Unless you are using an expensive proprietary software package, metrology and configuration control data is traditionally then tracked using a stand-alone database file which is carefully maintained by a single user. While this approach is simple, it is time consuming and lacks many of the modern accessibility features which are increasingly common to proprietary solutions. It is also highly prone to errors due to a lack of an adequate input checks nor does it provide the ability to review a time-history log of changes.

So the goal of 'this' extension is to keep the approach of an external database file as an end-product, but to utilize the highly-popular Mediawiki software as a ready-to go, feature-rich, user-based website to facilitate a simple web-portal from which to use features like, user-authentication and list export for the metrology database. This approach has many advantages, primarily, the ability to use the facilities/organizations preexisting network domain in order to validate users and assign permissions which allow users to view and update the Metrology database from a web-page as determined by the wiki administrator.

Important Caveat
This extension only works on a WAMP server (see below).

It is also important to state that this is a work in progress and is provided As-Is.
 * please report all bugs and feature requests here

=Mediawiki Mechanics= This extension will have you install:
 * 1) A custom skin (required! - I will be working to eliminate this as a requirement soon.)
 * 2) A collection of special pages in the wiki extensions folder
 * 3) Additional folders which will be instaled outside the wiki folder path
 * 4) A "System DNS" ODBC connection on the wiki server system (ADODB is a planed upgrade)
 * 5) The popular "wGET" executable
 * 6) A PHP PEAR Extension for generating MS-Excel spreadsheets.

=Extension Requirements=
 * 1) A WAMP Server equivalent to "Web-developer version 2.0"
 * (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=187164)
 * 1) Mediawiki (latest version)
 * (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download)
 * 1) wGet
 * (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wget)
 * (I got the Windows binary here: http://users.ugent.be/~bpuype/wget/#download)
 * 1) PHP Spreadsheet Express using PEAR
 * (http://pear.php.net/package/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer/)

Download instructions
visit: http://www.mavericks2252.net/archive/mediawiki-extensions/mccp/

and download the latest zip file.

Installation
Installation instructions are included in the downloaded zip file.

or

'''please see my complete installation walk-through on this articles "talk page"
 * here: Extension_talk:Mccp'''

=Personal note from the author= I am a test & measurement scientist/engineer who has been working in the national laboratory and aerospace test facilities environment for more than 12 years now. Between 2002 and 2005 I had a written a stand-alone web-application out of necessity called "Devlore*" which served the same purpose. (1) http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/AccelConf/ica05/proceedings/pdf/P1_096.pdf By late 2005 I had realized that although the Metrology functions worked, the web-site itself was out-of date and clunky. The value of being able to leverage Mediawiki as a stable, full-featured and highy customizable web-site foundation can not be under-stated. This has eliminated ALL of the burden of developing a website (and shifted strictly to administration of one) and allowed me to focus my programming effort solely on the Metrology and Configuration Control features that I wanted. I would like to extend an enormous "thank-you" to everyone in the Mediawiki development community for their contribution to society that will never fully be appreciated by the vast majority of users that benefit from it. ...That's the way it is, I think, for us engineer's (software or otherwise)...

I hope this extension proves useful to you. Please feel free to contact me about it.

Cheers! - Rich (revansx)