Project Cancelled (Maybe?) And A New One Arises

[ezfe]

Hi Ezekiel,

I've been thinking about you and Glenn (and others?) and your ideas about redoing the HHS website, and I have some ideas too. The thing is, right now, there is a strong push coming from the administration to shift our schools' main content over to Google Sites, for several reasons:

1. There ought to be a more consistent look and layout across all four schools and the SAU (right now, they are all completely different from each other, parents with students in multiple schools get confused trying to find the calendar or reading list or whatever etc.) and Google's templates/styles functionality allows for a multi-site change with minimal effort and no HTML/CSS knowledge required
2. Since we're all already working within the realm of Google Apps, the content maintainers would find it to be a familiar interface for editing content, since it's ready-made to accept the embedding of other Google content we're already using (calendars, docs, picasa slideshows, etc.)
3. Even our least-technically-minded users are mostly familiar with the basics of sharing documents (read only vs. edit, finding a person or a group to share to, etc.) so, the Sites sharing stuff would also be familiar, and would leverage the login credentials they already use every day to access their email

The general consensus is that we're willing to give up the ability to have total control over the look and layout in order to make it simpler for non-techy-users to maintain the content. I have no doubt that you could write a really good content management system from the ground up; but, in the end, I don't think that the school will end up using it no matter how great it is, because of the "oh geez, another login and another thing to learn and it doesn't look like the other sites" etc. factor.

THAT SAID -- there is another project that needs tackling, and is more complex than the main HHS site. Four years ago a student wrote a webapp for the March Intensive program, basically a miniature PowerSchool just for MI. It has been used every year since for students to request MI courses and then for the MI staff to assign them to courses. It uses a MySQL database that gets populated annually with the year's course offerings and a data dump of student info from PowerSchool. Every year I am the only one who can get it working again, since the student who wrote it has graduated, and he did it using Ruby and an embedded webserver configuration that I can barely understand. It's still running on an outdated Linux server and I have to reboot it almost weekly. I was unable to get it running on a new server because of all the modules and dependencies and stuff. It's a giant pain every year and I worry that the server will finally die and take the site with it. It would be FANTASTIC to have this system ported to something more standard, like PHP, and for some of the annual setup stuff to be re-arranged in some way so that a non-geek could maintain it year to year.

If that is of any interest to you, I'd be happy to show you the DB and source code and everything. It would be a great help to HHS and I think it'd be an interesting programming project.

In the future, if the HHS main site does get ported to Google Apps, there will most definitely be a need for students like you to help with both the technical aspects and the content management -- please don't think I'm trying to discourage you from getting involved, quite the opposite, everyone would like a greater level of student involvement with the site. I just don't want you or your friends to spend a great deal of time and effort on something that ends up not being used at all.

Let me know what you think. Feel free to share/forward to Glenn and the other student who was sitting with you (?) if he's part of your team too, I didn't catch his name. Thanks,

-- MB

[ezfe]

is away on a facetime mission. cya

[calubedy]

Google sites are evil.

[calubedy]

Oh, and remember to show this to the others, thanks! Rest In Peace.

[CouleeApps]

Closing this, we're still doing it.