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Website Information

For the 2011-2012 season we recognize a new division of our team: the website sub-team. Encouraging people with a wide range of abilities and interests has always been very important to MORT. Recognizing the website sub-team opens up the doors for members of the team who are interested in web development to focus and hone in their web development skills.

This season we decided to completely build the website from the ground up. Based on our previous look, we have written just about all of the html and css that goes into this site. One exception is our calendar which is provided by Google. This is to allow people to easily sync their Google Calendars with the MORT calendar.

As well as custom front end code, our back end code was custom written with the use of the webpy framework.

If you continue to explore the site, you may notice the password-protected member documents. We enjoy helping other FIRST teams, but we would like to keep our current season documents private to the team. However, we will release these documents to the public at the end of the season.

Finally, we'd like to recognize those who contributed their time to work on creating this website:

Coding
  • Patrick Jameson
  • Ryan Fino
  • Will Marshall
Graphics
  • Jay Shah
Content/Revision
  • Ryan Fino
  • Nick DiRienzo
  • Patrick Jameson


Our Website: A More Detailed Explaination

Below will explain in a bit more detail how this website was developed.

Structure Of Pages

A page is split up into two sections: the base and the content. The content is merely the content to the left of the sidebar. Everything else is the base.

With this in mind, it is easy to see how most of the pages could be easily made by reusing the base code and only changing the html in the content section of the page.

The base can be split up into the navigation bar, the sidebar, and the footer.

In-Page Editing and Creation of Pages

In order to make creating pages as simple and fast as possible, we implemented a system where anyone with a developer account may click "edit page" on the top of the content and quickly edit and save their changes. Even if the developer goes to a page that doesn't exist, he/she can click edit page and the page will be created. Here is what it looks like as I'm writing this.

At the time of writing this, developers have the option to change the page <title>, hide the sidebar, change the minimum account level to view a page, and change the HTML, CSS, and JS on the fly. In order to be efficient, no file is created unless a developer actually adds text to a field. Developers have a similar looking interface when editing the base.

If the default page title is changed or the sidebar is hidden, the script will create an entry in the postgresql table which is assisting in running this site. This information can then be accessed when the page is requested.

User Accounts and Restricted Access Pages

Certain pages on our website are only accessible to those who have a high enough privilege level on an account. For example, our documents page found at mort11.org/documents is only available to people who have an account.

One of the most useful pages for the team itself is mort11.org/order. On this page, sub-team leaders can order parts and supplies for whatever they need. The order is sent to our treasurer who in turn orders the part. The shipping status can then be dynamically updated on the page so that everyone can see what the status of their orders are. This system has dramatically changed the process or ordering parts from an annoying, non-transparent hassle to an easy to use and completely transparent system. Already this year, over $14,300 has gone through the system.

Because this page is so important, an account has been created especially for judges which allows access to mort11.org/order. Although the ordering ability has been disabled for this account, it gives a look into our world.

Username: judges
Password: judges

Some More Mention Worthy Pages

Our 2012 apparel ordering form. Ordering has been completed. This page handled almost $4,000 in orders.

Our 2012 Mount Olive FRC District event food pre-ordering page. This page will be active until the district event date arrives.

The photo gallery. This page was made basically from scratch. The back-end code merely gets a list of URLs from Google's Picasa service, who hosts some of our images, and then formats it correctly on the page.