Student Coding & CMS
 

When reading this year's web criteria, i noticed the section for student coding. Now, if you haven't seen the threads raving and ranting about CMS', then you should know most FIRST teams use them. They save time and hassle, and automate many tasks that you would have to do writing html over and over again.
My question is, how do you constitute student coding when you have a CMS? Now, most if not all that are used are opensource (they have to be. its hard to hide source code for that stuff ;)). For our CMS, DotNetNuke, i tore it apart changing things because it didnt suite our needs. Now, the judges will never know that i changed 33 lines in dnn.dom.positioning.js , but they will see its dotnetnuke and go "oh, they are lazy, they didnt even code the site."
Is this fair? What about the coding and the work that go into using a non-simple CMS. I agree that you could dismiss student coding if all u have is wordpress and its like a blog. But what do you do when you have the drupal site with it all reconfigure, hand coded skin, and hours of time put in?

Re: Student Coding & CMS
 

The better question, why does student coding matter? This goes back to a common theme discussed here; make vs buy. Now let us say that Team A has 15 students, one of whom is interested in programming (including doing the website) This student evaluates their options; build from scratch, use a CMS, beg a mentor to build from scratch, or modify a CMS. They consider that an off the shelf CMS would probably work really well and would allow them to offload the site content onto people who are more qualified to write the content (sub team leaders, mentors, PR students, etc) Would it be cost effective to code a site from scratch if a suitable system is available for free? Team A decides to go with an off the shelf CMS because their time can then be spent doing other things (such as making autonomous work)

Now the important question, was this student inspired and did they learn anything? My answer, no this student was not inspired* by creating this website. Did they learn something? Yes, they learned how things are evaluated in the real world and how best to utilize available resources. Both of these are important skills in any organization.

So, I ask that FIRST stop telling mentors how to inspire students. Some methods work for some students and mentors, others work for different mentors and students.

Just my $.02

*This student did not need to be inspired, they were already interested.

Re: Student Coding & CMS
 

I'm not a website judge, but my opinion is that some degree of customization is intrinsically necessary for any project to succeed. Practically nothing can be made from 100% COTS parts, save Vex or LEGO robots. In FRC, every team uses customized parts to some various degree, whether it's everything but the shifting transmissions, or only the arm and manipulator on their robot. But the fact remains that at the core, every team uses COTS parts.

Yes, a team can used to be able to built a robot using nothing but Kit parts, but if you wanted to do anything other than drive around you needed some degree of customization.

For team websites, there will always be a need to customize things. Sometimes the solution is to write code yourself, other times it's to use as many open-source technologies as possible to create a wonderful end result. There is no shame in using widely available open-source CMS systems for your website. Even www.whitehouse.gov uses Joomla Drupal.

Customize graphics. Figure out how the engine works and create a custom page layout theme. Figure out how to extend it. Do something to change it. Add content to it. Lots of content. And as long as the end result shows obvious changes from the COTS code to better reflect your team's goals, then in my non-official opinion, I'd consider that in the spirit of the student-coded goals.


Disclaimer: Back in high school I wrote a CMS [still] in use for Team 228. Starting with PHPBB for the forums, private messaging, and unified site login, I wrote all the code for the non-forum CMS features (like the photo galleries, news articles, event calendars, media tag clouds, content caching system, etc) and did all the graphics and content work myself. It took (on average) several hours of work every day for three years to do everything.

Re: Student Coding & CMS
 

I think it uses Drupal, not Joomla.

Re: Student Coding & CMS
 

CMS' are what thousands of companies and businesses use for their websites, but most make major customizations to the code, template, etc. To be honest, I think FIRST should kindly back off of this section of the competition in regards to the whole "student-built" mentality. I learned so much about Joomla and Wordpress because I used the systems for our website 2 years in a row while I was a high school student on the team, and now I'm getting to the point of editing everything to make it suit my needs. I've even started working with vBulletin and MyBB.

I'm guessing that we'll be missing out on the award this year, then, since I plan on setting up Wordpress and having the students work on the site.

Re: Student Coding & CMS
 

I was a website judge for 2009 and let me say that you can really tell when a lot of hard work was placed into the design and layout of the website. I know that CMS' automate a lot of tasks, but there is still a lot of room for teams to make changes to the design and layout. If you notice, a high amount of the score is based on the content of the website and how it is displayed. When a website really gives a sense of identity and customization, judges notice that and will give the team a higher score. At the very least I would expect the team to receive a 2, "Meets Expectations".