News » Say 'hello!' to the new CISE REU PI Website!

The revamped CISE REU PI website has just gone live!

Development and implementation efforts spanned the periods of February through April and August through October 2008 and amounted to the generation of approx. 9,200 lines of object-oriented PHP, SQL, XML, Javasript and AJAX code. The goal was to design and materialize a web site that is capable of supporting a lively, energetic, online community, encourage dialogue and exchange of ideas and opinions, communicate important information, facilitate the community’s events (such as its annual meeting), and host the increasing body of knowledge and experience gathered through these interactions, so that it can be shared with the world. In brief, important features of the revamped website are the following:

• User management system. Online users that desire to interact with the website (post messages in the forums, contribute to the Wiki, etc). are required to register. The user management system implements a simple user registration process with email verification. It also allows users to maintain their own public profile information. Finally, it allows site administrators to assign administrative and other special access privileges to individual users by assigning them to appropriate user groups.      
   
• News announcement and management. The site offers the capability of managing (creating, editing, deleting) news items and publishing them on the News page. The management of news is currently being performed only by users belonging to the Administrators' group.
   
• Embedded community Google calendar. The Calendar page hosts a Google calendar that can be used as a common calendar of events. Apart from using it to announce various annual meeting related events, members of the CISE REU PI community can use it to share important events related to their own REU Sites.
   
• Online content management. A compact content management system was developed to manage the creation of and access to specific online content of the website. For example, the FAQs and the Annual Meeting pages are managed (created, edited and deleted) by user groups of content managers. The system allows these groups to manage the content content managers to assign special access to additional users.
   
• Embedded, online WYSIWYG editor. The site features an integrated, online WYSIWYG editor that can be used by authorized users to manage the content of specific pages like the ones just mentioned. This feature eliminates the need for the user to be familiar with web development or to upload files to the web server, in order to update online content. The editor supports common content elements, such as images, links to URLs or uploaded files, anchors, lists, etc.
   
• Forum support and management. The site supports both moderated and non-moderated forums (currently all forums are moderated). Unregistered users are unable to post to any forum. While any register user can post anything to a non-moderated forum, messages to moderated forums are posted only after one of the forum's moderators has first reviewed and then approved the message. Appropriate notifications are implemented via automatically generated emails for the involved parties. Moreover, users can individually manage their subscription to multiple selected forum topics, so that they are notified via email, when a new reply is posted in one of their subscribed forums. Finally, forums can be public or private; the latter type of forums are only visible to their moderators.
   
• Integrated wiki. The web site also integrates with the popular wiki software provided by Wikimedia, which is also used by www.wikipedia.org; users that log into the web site are also automatically logged into the Wiki. The Wiki's purpose is to facilitate asynchronous, multi-author, online collaboration in compiling REU-related data and knowledge. Note, that in order to contribute to the Wiki, users need first to be registered with the website.