UCLA Society of Latino Engineers and Scientists is an organization
promoting Latinos in the technical fields of Engineering and Sciences. The
UCLA SOLES prior to this website were borrowing space off of a UCLA
Engineering server. Not only did this result in not having a domain name,
but it also meant that the site was seriously limited, as it was unable to
host anything other than static html pages and images. When taking on this
project for SOLES, of which I am a member, I had to decide what I wanted
to have dynamic and how I wanted it to be maintained after I created the
site. Originally, not knowing if I would have access to a database I
described everything in XML. This allowed content to be separated from
design. Still, much of the site is described in XML, and this allows easy
modification of the pages without having to figure out what the style
should look like. Even though this site is for a group of Engineers, they
deemed XML to tedious to work with on a constant basis, and I would end up
updating the Calendar everytime something was supposed to be added.
This caused me to move the Calendar system off to a database, and as a
result I had to create an administrator section of the website, because I
could no longer rely on maintainers uploading XML files, now they had to
have access to the database. The administration section, although locked
away is one of the nicest pieces of this website. It allows for user
creation, granting and revoking user privaliges, uploading of images and
albums, and modification of the calendar in a very dynamic and interactive
way.
To visit go to
uclasoles.com
