Over the past few months, I've been working on upgrading St. Ann's Catholic School website from the circa 1996 look to something more modern.
So far, I've done the following:
- Organized the site in a logical fashion
- Implemented a menu system using Tanfa's CSS driven Menus
- Used Purplehaze.css as a baseline for the website's cascading stylesheet
- Created and helped edit static content for the site (I instructed a non-technical person on how to upload the static content and change the content so far.)
Since that's done, I can focus on the dynamic nature of the site. There are a number of stated features to be implemented, including:
- Ability to add weekly newsletters
- Ability to add homework
- Ability to add events (a la Google Calendar)
- Ability to see recently added information
To make this happen, I need to take the following steps:
- Create Database Schema
- Use NHibernate and My Generation to create POCO objects and theData Access Layer and Mapping files
- Create Business logic and create individual modules listed above
- Deploy and Maintain
I intend to use this blog to document this, and obviously the code will be released (open source, license unknown) to allow other schools to create dynamically driven sites without having to rely on sites like TeacherWeb. I don't have anything against TeacherWeb, I just can't believe that schools would pay for what amounts to a WYSIWYG editor (not unlike Frontpage).
You may wonder why I'm using CSS Menus and Stylesheets from other authors instead of rolling my own. I could do both (though the latter would be far easier than the former); the reason is easy, never design what you can steal.