Websites that could be final projects

[Matt Buscemi]

Hi everyone,

This is the last email I'll put in your inbox via google groups today, I promise. :)

I got a request for a list of concrete examples of existing sites that fall within the scope of the final project.  Here goes:

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki - In practice, wikis get huge.  Mediawiki, which powers Wikipedia, has millions upon millions (if not billions) of pages.  Obviously, such a system would not survive without software that highly optimizes database transactions.  That said, it is possible to make a small wiki (one that will never grow beyond a few hundred pages) without the help of a relational database.  You don't even need multiple languages or a user login system like you see on the Mediawiki homepage.  Here's all you really need:
• Decide how you want to store the information for a page.  Probably in a text file.  Maybe XML or JSON.
• Write a few "test" pages worth of files.  Then you'll have to get PHP to read those files and dump the results into variables
• Finally, you'll need to create some HTML forms that allow you to edit the contents of the files, and do so in a way that doesn't allow someone to crash your server.
• If this seems too difficult now, don't worry.  The next four weeks will give you the tools you need to accomplish this.
• http://ocremix.org/ - Just like the last, this page has more going on than you need.  Try to imagine the page in terms of "bare bones" functionality.  We need some mechanisms:
• Getting whatever is the most recent post and putting it at the top of the screen (even if it's a youtube video that shows up over the Javascript menus you made >_<)
• Getting the most recent five announcements, remixes, discussion posts, etc. and displaying them
• Get the ten most recent uploaded song and display them in a column on the right side
• A lot of the other functionality of this site is superfluous, where our final project is concerned.  Optimally though, you'd probably make a page that demonstrates the ability to show all the songs for a particular game (http://ocremix.org/game/6/final-fantasy-vi-snes) and the page that highlights all of the data of just one song (http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01309/).
• http://wordpress.org/news/ - This is the best example I could find of a really bare bones blog.  Here's what you really need to get a blog running:
• A page that shows 5-10 of the most recent blog posts, including the title, date of posting, the name of the person who posted, and a snippet of the content
• A page that shows a single blog post in its entirety
• A way to create new posts, probably via a form.

Most of the sites you will find on the web, especially today, are the result of hundreds of hours of hard work.  They built new pieces and extended software many, many times over.  Most sites are not Google.  Google has done an excellent job of maintaining a simple, elegant homepage.  However, I am almost certain that the engine that runs Google search has likely been upgraded and expanded many, many time in the last decade.  However, when most sites tack on new features, their display becomes more complex.  It becomes overwhelming to think about implementing everything that you see, or even imagining how it all gets implemented.

Try to break down a site into its most basic components.  What do I need to make a functional music page?  A display of ebooks? A functional blog?  Throwing out all the fluff, this task will get much easier and seem much more manageable.

- Matt