Seminar Website Project

1
Seminar Website Project

• by Maxim Timchenkoand Shai Ziv
• Supervisor Yoram Yihyie
• Spring 2002

2
Goals

• Design and implement a website for publishing a
  seminar schedule on the Internet.
• Provide facilities for easy editing of the
  schedule.
• Provide different views, sort seminars by topics,
  allow users to sign up to various related mailing
  lists.

3
Environment

• Server with a RedHat Linux OS
• Apache HTTP server
• PHP Scripting Language
• MySQL Database Engine

4
Site Users

• 3 classes of users have been identified
• Administrators create new seminar categories,
  assign users to categories, manage users, may
  change everything on the site
• Regular users manage seminars in the categories
  assigned to them, may add sub-categories under
  theirs
• Guests may browse the listof seminars, check the
  details and subscribe tovarious mailing lists.

5
Feature Checklist

• Available to administrators only, administrators
  and users, everyone

• Manage (add/edit/delete) categories, assign users
  to categories
• Manage sub-categories under assigned category,
  assign users to those sub-categories
• Manage users
• Manage seminars
• Same, under assigned sub-categories

• Browse seminar list by topic
• Week-view and month-view of all seminars during
  the period
• Details on seminar place, speaker, title,
  abstract, mailing list, picture
• Category mailing list
• Print version

6
Categories

• To classify a large amount of seminars, two tree
  structures of categories are used one for
  academic relationship and one for topic.
• For example, a seminar on ray-tracing may be
  categorized as1) Topics ? Computer Graphics ?
  3D Graphics2) Academic ? CS Faculty
• A seminar may be placed into any number of
  categories.

7
Implementation

• A simple design that would be easily extensible,
  accessible on most platforms and to students with
  disabilities (for example, would not break when
  font size is increased).

8
Implementation

• Home page shows several upcoming seminars.
• Search for author, seminar name, description, or
  in any field.
• Read the credits.
• Count the visitors.

9
Implementation

• Weekly calendar

• Monthly calendar

10
Implementation

• Category tree, category and seminar details

11
Administration
12
Ideas for Improvement

• Extend the Search to search in a specific time
  interval
• Add a mailing-list server
• Upload icons instead of linking
• Register people to seminars
• Send email/SMS reminders to registered attendees
• Integrate the project into the faculty/Technion
  website ?