Cultures Paper\Project Proposal

English 10 Cultures Project Step 7 - Project Proposal *Instructions

Submitted 11/??/2006

Only a DRAFT!

May change/be updated - still in progress - may still contain inaccuracies

As part of the Cultures Project, I must create a project which will bring awareness about different, global problems to the general public. To make my project unique, I plan to utilize my special technical skills in internet application development. Thus, I am planning to create a online question and answer website called "Conflicter". The project will be open to the entire internet online at http://conflicter.org. The project will be based on Tecker (http://tecker.net) code I have been developing in the past few months. The goal of the project is to end global ignorance through the spread of information.

On the website, any users will be able to register for a free account. They will then be able to ask questions about global culture. The questions will be then stored on the site. Anyone can then answer these questions using the web form. Thus, this is an interactive community site.

There will also be categories for questions. When a user asks a question, they will be asked to select a category for that question. Thereafter, the question will appear in this category. The list of questions will also be able to be sorted by by recency and by the user who submits the question. There will also be RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and allows users to subscribe the the list of questions in order to read them in their newsreaders or certain web browsers.

Because of the vast complexities of coding PHP, this project is about the framework. Content will not be the focus of this project, as the goal of this Cultures Project is to build a framework for future user-contributions. This is different from other projects I have completed and what I expect others in the class will do.

The website will be written in PHP and use a MySQL database. It will run on my hosted servers at 1&1 on Appache server software running on Linux. This combination of open-source software is commonly called the "LAMP" platform. The website will be formatted using semantic markup. It will use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to format the page in a logical and clean way. The site will be validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict and be viewable on modern web browsers including mobile browser, such as cell phones and PDAs

All submissions to the website will be available under the Creative-Commons Attribution 2.5 (and subsequent) license. This means any submisions can be reposted elseware as long as the contributing user is attributed.

The actual code from the site will remain property as of Tecker and remain propitiatory. Because it contains possible trade secrets of Tecker, it will not be submitted with the project, however will be available for viewing. The site will remain property of Michael Plasmeier and Tecker after the project is submitted, and operations are expected to continue.

The site will also be advertised on http://minisites.theplaz.com, http://theplaz.com, and http://tecker.net