Information for Prospective Students

Objectives

At the end of this course, students should be able to:

* Walk an organization through a process that leads to the deployment of a web site whose contents the organization can maintain over time;
* Suggest and implement a variety of community features for such sites;
* Get a good-paying job or internship with one of the many consulting firms that offer these services. (Many are currently turning down clients because they cannot hire enough qualified personnel. See http://groups.drupal.org/consulting.)

Pre/co-requisites

Students should have taken SI501 or have equivalent experience working on a project team for a real-world client. Non-SI students should contact the instructors-- we are willing to make exceptions for students who bring other specific skills, especially PHP, CSS, and/or drupal experience.

This year, part of SI631 will be devoted to an introduction to Drupal, the content management system we will be using. Students do hands-on exercises where they select, install, and configure available drupal modules, create taxonomies or free tagging systems for a site's content, set different user roles and access controls, create and configure different content types for a site, and make small modifications to existing "themes".

Students with some programming background are encouraged to also take SI 635, in the second half of the semester. In that course, students will learn how to customize application platforms (including drupal) by writing small amounts of code. In this course, we need some students who can make these programming modifications to the drupal platform, but not every student needs to be able to do this.

Meeting Schedule

The course meets Monday evenings, 5-8pm; we will split the time between 412 WH and the DIAD. In past workshop classes, we have found it to extremely valuable for student teams to have additional work time together, with support from the instructors. If at all possible, please reserve Friday afternoons as group work time. Instructors will make an effort to be available at this time as well.

Clients and Mentors

During November and December, we will be lining up potential clients. We will seek a variety of cultural, political, and service oriented organizations as clients. We will seek projects that involve some interaction among the users of the CMS sites, as opposed to one-way transmission of information sites. If you have possible clients that you'd like us to get in touch with, please send email to the instructors.
This year, all clients will be local to Ann Arbor.

On the first day of class, you'll have a chance to indicate preferences for projects (and teammates), and the instructors will then assign teams.