Introducing: GUS Team 228's 2007 Website!

[artdutra04]

At last, here is GUS Team 228's 2007 website!

http://www.team228.org/


Here is some quick stats about our website:

The site is driven by a 100% custom-coded PHP/MySQL CMS that I personally wrote myself. At just north of 10,000 lines of PHP code with thousands of MySQL database entries, it's a beast.

Also, as you might notice, all the URLs of every page are "user friendly". Instead of having really ugly URLs like somefile.php?portal=media&section=pictures&chapter =2007&page=kickoff-event&offset=2 you end up with "nice" URLs like this:
www.team228.org/media/pictures/2007/kickoff-event

Content! At over 159 unique pages of content, we certainly have a huge website!

Users of Chief Delphi may notice a few similar features: Our photo galleries are taggable and searchable!

And did I mention the RSS feeds?

If our website stats are anything to go by, with several hundred unique visitors calling up thousands of page views every day (excluding all "spiders" or "bots"), it certainly seems we have a popular team website!

Edit: If our website seems slow today, it's because our hosting company is doing server maintenance this week... *sigh*

[Akash Rastogi]

Great site guys.
Check out ours.
M.O.R.T Team 11

[(Click_Here)]

You guys have a very amazing website right there! It's definitly on the track of winning something very good this year.

This is definitly one of my favorite FIRST team websites.

[Dan Petrovic]

*tear*

It's beautiful...

[Jay H 237]

Good job Art!

I just spent the past 20 minutes on your team's site and I still haven't seen the whole thing! I like the layout and the navigation.

[Chris Marra]

Art, any chance of releasing the source code? :-P

But really, the site looks great. It is very easy to navigate, has tons of information, and of course, the backend that serves all of it up must be amazing. Is it designed so that even mentors, or new team members could use it without a walk-through to add/edit/manage information in the future?

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by Chris Marra

Art, any chance of releasing the source code? :-P

But really, the site looks great. It is very easy to navigate, has tons of information, and of course, the backend that serves all of it up must be amazing. Is it designed so that even mentors, or new team members could use it without a walk-through to add/edit/manage information in the future?

I did provide the source code to Greg for any potential use on The Blue Alliance's website. But I wouldn't count it out of the question for the base "module" and tagging system source code to be released to the public. Eventually. ;-) But I would have a lot of things to "clean up" in the code first, as I hard coded in a bunch of team228.org specific code.

The backend is still coming along, and I still have a lot of features to add to it to simplify the process as much as possible. But to speak of the simplicity of the system, I had freshmen on our team who have never coded anything before able to go through, (and after a quick five minute explanation) upload pictures into a photo gallery, and add complete descriptions and tags to them. Most of the 2007 pictures in the galleries had their descriptions and tags added by students on our team who don't have knowledge or experience in HTML.

On all the other pages, such as the What's Gus pages, I used very simple HTML code in all of them, so that adding/updating content would be typing up a post here on CD. I use <h2>, <h4>, <img>, <p>, <strong>, <em>, and <a>. And that's it. Learning how to use seven HTML tags is very easy, so keeping these pages updated should be easy as well.

Thanks for the positive feedback everyone!

[Kyle Fenton]

Nice Job!

It’s a very nice & clean layout.

My only suggestion is to push down the submenus on main tool bar ( where home, team, media, events, resources are). The submenus are covering the main menu buttons.

Keep up the good work

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by Kyle Fenton

Nice Job!

It’s a very nice & clean layout.

My only suggestion is to push down the submenus on main tool bar ( where home, team, media, events, resources are). The submenus are covering the main menu buttons.

Keep up the good work

Were you using Safari? Of all the browsers and OS's that I tested (IE5 Mac, IE6 WinXP, IE7 WinXP, FF2 WinXP, FF2 Mac, Safari Mac, Opera WinXP) Safari was the only one that pushed the sub-menus up about 10 pixels. I'll have to look into what's causing that...

Those menus took a lot of work until they finally functioned perfectly, as they are compltely valid XHTML Strict and CSS code - without any Javascript! (IE6 doesn't count as a "standards compliant" browser, hence the need for a small Javascript "helper" file.). If you use Firefox, Opera, or Safari and disable Javascript and refresh the page, the menus will still work perfectly!

This not only helps people navigate our site easier, but it also helps Google's spiderbot in its page indexing quest as well. For the past two years, Google seems to love our site. Search for "robotics team" on Google and see what pops up in the first page of results.

[GRaduns340]

I used a pure CSS drop-down for our site as well. It does take a lot of work, but it's definitely worth it if you can put in the effort. The one thing I did different was that I didn't use Javascript at all, even for IE5/6. I used .htc and the <!-- [if < IE7] --> to change the class on a pseudo-mouseover event and added a second CSS file specifically for IE. One catch that I haven't fixed yet, though, is that if you leave off the www, that part doesn't work.

[petek]

Refreshingly simple and elegant, with strong navigability and subtle humor! A truely fine website and an excellent example of how to make your information accessible and attractive at the same time.

[Gigaman2003]

Very nice frontend, like i've said earlier your site is one of few that I am impressed by. I cringe at the amount of SQL you have used though. Thousands of mysql entries are just completely unnecessary, and not a good idea for such a small site.


Anyway I should'nt be saying that cause we've already begun writing our own database backbone(PQL) instead of mySQL (which we hate), and then writing a CMS,Blog and Gallery using PQL.

So far PQL is looking very promising, and Scribe2 and Kure were a huge successes, with over 2000 downloads. We're hoping to out do ourselves with a even higher quality Scribe3 (our CMS) running on PQL next year.

Its a lot of work but I love programming and am already well into a college degree in it so its really a fun project for me to challenge myself with.

Hmm going off topic here. Back on track Awesome site, I really like it. Too bad i've never seen you guys at any regionals. Would love to finally meet the team!

[Brian J. R.]

*hears angles sing* wow, your site is simply awesome. I wish ours was like that (being that it is only a background as of now.....um.....ya.....) Although I do have to ask something, is the navigation bar HTML or Flash? We are thinknig of making a flash/html site for the looks of flash but are slightly worried because of 1, load times and 2, um....we dont know how......

But in all honesty, the site is clean cut and very nice. You see what you need to see with out any distractions. Kudos to you.

Brian Richards, 1983 Mechanic

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by Gigaman2003

Very nice frontend, like i've said earlier your site is one of few that I am impressed by. I cringe at the amount of SQL you have used though. Thousands of mysql entries are just completely unnecessary, and not a good idea for such a small site.

There are just shy of three thousand pictures in our photo gallery at the moment, and each one of them is in a separate entry. Lather, rinse, and repeat as desired for the rest of the site, and with the amount of content we have you can easily see how it starts adding up.

Originally Posted by Gigaman2003

Hmm going off topic here. Back on track Awesome site, I really like it. Too bad i've never seen you guys at any regionals. Would love to finally meet the team!

Thanks for the positive comments! For the past few years, we've only competed at the UTC Regional and the Championships, but this year we were on the waiting list for the Championships, so all we had this year was UTC. A bunch of our members/alumni (including myself) are probably going down to the Championships to volunteer though, and we may even sign up our FVC team to compete there.

Although I do have to ask something, is the navigation bar HTML or Flash? We are thinknig of making a flash/html site for the looks of flash but are slightly worried because of 1, load times and 2, um....we dont know how..

All it contains is valid XHTML and CSS, with a tiny bit of Javascript that is only needed to fix a bug from Internet Explorer 6. No Flash was used or harmed in the making of this navigation menu. I don't like using Flash for navigation, as it greatly complicates things for people who don't have Flash installed. (And one of our "target populations" are students at our high schools, and half the time there isn't Flash installed on their computers, so a Flash navigation bar would be useless.)

[Brian J. R.]

Ok thanks for the advice. We are using Dreamweaver under OS X 10.4 for web development, with Firefox, Opera, Camino, DeskBrowse, Flock, iCab, Shiira, and Safari for testing. The reason we thought Flash would be a good idea is because Dreamweaver and Flash Pro intergrate so well. I'll have to talk to the web crew about not using it then. Thanks

Brian Richards, 1983 Mechanic