Acceptance Test

for the Arsdigita Community System by Tracy Adams
Use this to test an ACS installation. Going through these steps is also a good way to learn the major features of Arsdigita Community System administration.

Installation

You should ensure the database has been properly configured and that your AOLserver installation will actually start.
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Registration

You should test basic registration and the login process.
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User Administration

You should test adding a user, searching for users, modifying user data, banning or deleting a user, and spamming a class of users.
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Bboard System

You should test setting up a bboard, posting a message, alerts, and searching.
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Classified Ads

You should test setting up a domain, posting/editing and ad, alerts, hot auctions and searching.
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Download

You should test adding new downloads, upload versions of existing downloads, adding rules to all versions/specific version of a download, edit/remove download data, download a file, view download history.
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User searchers

The searches you made in the bboard and classified ads should have been logged. View the user searches section in the admin pages to verify.

News

You should test story posting, story approval, and story editing (for both site-wide and group scope). You can also test the interface into the general comments module.
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Calendar

You should test adding an event, approving events, and adding comments.
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Curriculum

Neighbor to Neighbor

You should test creating a domain and subcategory, adding and approving a posting, adding and adding and approving a comment, and searching. Suggested Method:

Stolen equipment registry

You should test adding and entry, adding a comment, and searching.
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HTML Comments and Related Links

You should test syncing the html pages with the database, adding/editing comments, adding/editing related links.
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Referrals

You should test that referral tracking is working.
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Clickthroughs

You should test that clickthroughs are logging.
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Ad Server

You should test that you can insert and view ads.
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Contest System

You should test setting up a contest, contest entry, modifying contest parameters, and voting.
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Ticket Tracker

You should test adding users, creating a project, and creating an issue.
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Chat

File-Storage

Bookmarks

Portals

Pull-Down Menus

Address Book

You should test adding, editing, viewing and searching for a contact.
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Directory

You should test searching and browsing the directory.
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Glossary

You should test definition entry, editing, approval, and deletion.
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General Links

You should test link entry, rating, editing, approval, and deletion.
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Polls

You should test poll entry, editing, voting, and reporting.
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User groups

You should test links to sections, group membership and group spamming.
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General Permissions

Run the automated acceptance test. This tests all PL/SQL functions against the data model.

Press

You should test adding, viewing, editing, and deleting a press item:

FAQ

Events

You should make sure that you can create an event, register for it, and review registrations.
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Template System

Go to a number of pages under /ecommerce/ and make sure they get displayed with uniform style, e.g.

  index.tcl
   -> product-search.tcl
  shopping-cart.tcl
  gift-certificate-order.tcl
  gift-certificate-order-2.tcl
   -> gift-certificate-order-3.tcl
       -> gift-certificate-order-4.tcl
(The style is defined in /web/yourservername/tcl/ecommerce-styles.tcl).

Note: this is the old template system, documented in style.html; the new one by Karl Goldstein is not included in the ACS.

Categorization and User Profiling

You should be able to add categories, define their positions in category hierarchy and, as registered user, choose content categories you're interested in.

Graphing

Stick this into a .tcl file and then access it with your browser:
set legend [list "1997" "1998" "1999" "2000"]

set subcategory_category_and_value_list [list [list "Dog" "Favorite Animal" [list "45" "47" "40" "45"]] \
                [list "Cat" "Favorite Animal" [list "20" "21" "19" "21"]] \
                [list "Other" "Favorite Animal" [list "35" "32" "41" "34"]] \
		[list "Pizza" "Favorite Food" [list "34" "33" "35" "35"]] \
		[list "Chocolate" "Favorite Food" [list "24" "25" "24" "25"]] \
		[list "Other" "Favorite Food" [list "42" "42" "41" "40"]]]
               

ns_return 200 text/html "<font face=arial size=+2>Madrona Elementary School Annual Poll Results</font>
<p>
[gr_sideways_bar_chart -legend $legend $subcategory_category_and_value_list]
"
It should produce a lovely four-color bar chart!

Ecommerce

After you have completed the setup tasks in Technical Details of the Ecommerce Module, here are some good tests of the things most likely to be broken: Once all this is working, you can further test your system:

Display Module

Test cascaded style sheet settings and uploading of a logo

General Comments

Test tcl procedures used for adding comments to pages and test general comments admin pages

Help

Make sure that help links work and that appropriate .help files are used

Content Sections

Test content section admin pages

New modules

Systematically go through each option making sure:

Intranet

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Data Pipeline

Data Pipeline will be fully exercised by the Intranet module.

Simple Survey

You should test creating a new survey, editing a survey, enabling a survey, responding to a survey and viewing responses.

WimpyPoint

CRM

Referer Module

Member Value Module

Education Module

Glassroom

Robot Detection

In order to test the Robot Detection package, we need to be able to request URLs from the site with a User-Agent that is listed in the robots table and see for ourselves that the results are as expected.

The simplest approach to testing this is to add a FilterPattern into the [ns/server/yourservername/acs/robot-detection] section of the parameters file and to add a record into robots that matches a web browser program and use that browser to access the site. The following SQL works for Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 on Windows NT:

insert into robots(robot_id, robot_name, robot_details_url, robot_useragent)
values('msie4', 'Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 (for testing purposes only)',
'http://www.microsoft.com/ie/', 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows NT)');
Just be sure to delete this row when you go into production!


teadams@mit.edu