So far I’ve been working on all aspects of the site at once, without having a specific due date in mind. Because it might eventually seem to take ‘forever’ and members will start getting impatient if week after week there’s still nothing to see, I’ve come up with a plan for the launch: Instead of waiting till the whole site is re-done, I’m going to release one feature at a time.
Here are the 7 main sections of the new site, in the order that they will appear:
- Wiki (It’s coming first because that’s the main part of WikiStudent, and it is also not reliant on the main database tables (besides the users table of course) which will be created later on.
- Student Jobs (Because this is so easy to implement. Just a bit of RSS and Ajax and it will be done!)
- Study Buddies (This will also be relatively quick, since Xoops has a built-in profile search tool that I must just modify slightly…)
- Download Study Notes (It’s not going to be a simple install this time round, because of the coding involved in capturing notes requests for notes that are not yet available).
- Unisa Past Papers (This will be a custom-written plugin. Again, I’m putting off coding till as late as possible!)
- Unisa Textbooks (People will only be selling books after the exams, so this one’s not so urgent. It’s also going to be the biggest job and the more time I have to think about it, the better).
- Discussion Forums (Just to prevent the forums from being used for any of the above 6 points, they’re coming last!)
Somewhere in between I’ll also have to fit in creating a nice-looking html newsletter.
With all the public holidays next month, I think it’s safe to say that by the end of April there will be a website up and running, with a wiki that has 100 Unisa modules ready to be populated by you!