Web Site Requirements

There are no particular constraints on the form that the micromouse web site should take, provided that it satisfies the minimum features listed below. You should, however, aim to provide an attractive and easy to use site. Please take care with issues of good web design such as accessibility. This is easiest to achieve if standards are used.

Each micromouse web site will have a web site hosted on eespectre.swan.ac.uk. The webserver is a SuSE Linux server running Apache, PHP and the MySQL relational database – that is LAMP.

For ease of development we recommend that you use a content management system (CMS) and based on last year's experience we would recommend use of Drupal which is written for the LAMP platform.

Each web site will have a public and a private part.

The Public Part must have:

• A home Page introducing your mouse to the world.
• A team page introducing your team to the world
• A news page giving latest progress reports and items of interest.
• A project planning section which shows how you plan to tackle the development of your mouse and its web site. There should be a minimum of a Gantt chart and a list showing what skills your team members have and who is doing what.
• A public documents section which should include all design documents, hardware experiments, test results, etc.
• Team and individual web logs

The Private Part must:

• Be accessible only to members of your team and the assessors
• Provide access to an upload site for users to upload documents (e.g. as a web folder using WebDAV or as an FTP upload site).

You may in addition provide additional features to aid team collaboration. For example, you might consider providing:

• Wiki
• Bulletin board/forum
• Web mail
• Group chat
• Project management tools
• Source code management and issue tracking

Note, there are many public domain and open source packages that you can use to provide these features. It is also acceptible to link external services or the Oremi system into your web site to provide some of these features.

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