Exercise 2

Course Registration System ("Ilmo 2.0")- first iteration

Current "ilmo" (http://ilmo.cs.helsinki.fi) is not very flexible. For the next 5 weeks, let's develop a radically different 2.0 version of it.

This might seem a bit boring exercise, but have you ever seen a course registration system with a newsfeed, where you can see in which courses your friends have planned to attend and "like" that? All students are also very familiar with it, so we should have a clear vision of required features.

Main new ideas (for the next 6 weeks):

At the end of this course, I would like to see something like this:

Student should be able to register for multiple exercise groups
Students should be able to pre-register themselves in advance.
- This helps the department to get enough instructors for the courses.
Student should be able to queue for a specific group (and system should auto-register people from queue if places become available)
- This gives good feedback for planning the times for exercise groups
It should be possible to overbook a group
It should be possible to create a user account without an account from University of Helsinki (guests)
Student should see in which group their friends are registered in.
System should be localized in different languages (Swedish, English, Finnish) and languages and translations should be modified from some kind of administrative UI.
Generic help texts should be editable from administrative UI. (Lightweight CMS)
Student should be able to upload a profile picture
System should have a "planner view" where a student should see all possible times for courses
It should be possible to change a group in a "transaction"
It should be possible to generate PDF reports from course participants and such.

START working on ex3 at the exercise session, pair-programming!

Exercises (features to implement)

Required features

You should have these features implemented at the exercise session. You get 1 point for each implemented feature.

1p: Listing of all courses with links (left browser window of that picture)
- Links point to the course page
1p: Showing one course details on separate page
- Shows course description, name
1p: A Ruby script to generate testing data into the database
- Must be able to define how many courses you want in database (0..1000)
- An option to delete existing data in database OR append to the database

Optional features

You can select three of the following:

1p: Common layout
- CSS stylesheet linked to every page "in a Rails way"
- Common layout for all pages (one file to define basic layout, <head> -section)
1p: Each page shows the time when the page was generated
- must be in "Finnish" format: 4.11.2009 09:57
1p: Application is running in your own local server AND in rails.cs.helsinki.fi
1p: You are using Postgres or MySQL instead of SQLite

I want to become an expert (+1credit)

All of the above
Creation of new courses with a form