Team 357's Website

[Knippschild]

A few of us here at Royal Assault have been working hard on a new website that will blow our old website out of the water. Royal Assault has formed a sub-team with the mission to create a website that will leave it's users in awe. The head team members are listed below the summary.

This is how it works (warning: it's some bit techinical.. and long):

We have access to a webserver with PHP (dynamic scripting language) and mySQL (database backend). Each student/mentor has their own account. Every account has it's own entry in the database, where the website front end calls this information, specific to the user. The data stored is simple contact information, username, password, and the permission values. You may be asking yourself, "Well Jonathan, What are permission values?" This is our coolest set of features. Each user has values for what they can or can not do. These things include writing articles, editing articles, media management, etc. If they have this value set to 1, they may access the administrative functions for that feature, if they do not, the server will reject access. The article system is pretty cool too. If a student user were to post an article, it would not be displayed in public view until a mentor or administrative user would approve it, and then it would be bumped to the main page. The same process takes place when an article is edited; however, if the student user has the _override tag for either permission (can_edit_override, can_write_override), it will immediatly show up on the main page.

Another feature that really helps the students and sub-team leaders out is the SubTeam Manager section. When a student is logged into the website, they may manage what sub-teams they are a part of, which keeps everything organized. They may join subteams if the subteam is listed as non-restricted; however, if the subteam is marked as restricted, a subteam leader must approve of it. Sub team leaders have access to things such as a Subteam Emailer, which sends an email to any subteam they are a "leader" and subteam line up editing (where they may set who is a leader as well as approve or decline join requests).

The mentors have their own array of tools. They also have access to a subteam manager, where they have access to all sub-teams (versus a student who could only administrate subteams in which they lead). Mentors have a User Editor where they can edit users (well, duh) and set settings like user permissions, address, password, etc. Mentors also have the ability to upload files to the server that students may download; files include (but not limited to) permission slips, release forms, and legal documents. Also for security reasons, mentors can also access the logs that is triggered when a user does something of importantance (edit a user, bad login, page 404 errors, etc).

A small clarification: There is a slight difference between an administrative user and a mentor user. An administrative user is generally a student with permission to access every feature, similar to mentors.

There is almost no hardcoding of any content on the website; almost everything is being pulled from the database in one way or another.

The media section is always important to any website. This is a really cool feature that I coded (with a lot of help from Megan Durkin) that allows for a subcategory system, which supports both video and picture media types. A media manager user would upload a file through the FTP in the proper folder/directory (folder heirarchy follows the subcategory heirarchy) then hit the scan button in the control panel. The script would then search the folder selected for new files and folders (again, folders are the sub categories); if any are found, they are then added to the media database and as such displayed on the website.

We are really pleased to what we are about to bring to the FIRST community.

We did not buy or download this system; but I have done most of the coding myself (with some help from Mr. Troy, Megan Durkin, and Andrew Adaman)

Whoa.. that was a really long-winded summary. Mr Troy teaches me well, I guess.

Here are the members of the Royal Assault Webteam, and their respective posistion.

Jonathan Knippschild (Main Coder)
Adam Katze (Layout designer)
Andrew Adaman (Code Advisor, Logic Checker)
Sree Dandumandi (CSS Advisor)
Jason Cola (Head Media Advisor)
Chris Massi (Calendar Keeper)

Special thanks for the website goes to the Royal Assault Writing team, Megan Durkin, Ms Hale, and Mr. Troy.

We plan to launch the website this weekend. We will post another thread celebrating this much anticipated web-site. Make sure you check it out

If anyone has any comments or questions, feel free to reply to this thread.

Jonathan Francis Knippschild