Website Wish List

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This is a list of things that we'd like to see on the website eventually. Please add any comments that you have.

The big jobs

Webmail

A nice webmail client, with an intuitive interface, search capability, and indexed mail.

  • The indexed thing is a backend feature that users shouldn't even need to know about, but at the moment mail access is extremely slow as it requires reading headers from files stored on minerva's disk array. Implementing this may require writing a daemon of some sort to maintain the indexes - this is more of a heavy programming job then a simple web development job.
    • Genius engineer guy from work suggested that we look into Apache Lucene for full text indexing in the pub, could make the fast search feature a reality :)
  • It would be nice if the client integrated with the user's procmail configuration somehow, to allow filter rules to be added through a GUI. Perhaps have the client (optionally) write a comment-delimited section of it's own to the .procmailrc file of the user (in the same way, for example, that dpkg modifies the /boot/grub/menu.lst file when you install a new linux kernel).

News boards

A nice news client. I'm still confident that it's possible to create a very user-friendly interface to the redbrick boards, it'll require some programming though.

  • Like the webmail, this should be searchable and indexed and stuff for speed. The current boards client is extremely slow as it supports only rudimentary disk caching. If a new post is added, the entire board is redownloaded. It's messy.
  • A daemon will have to be written again.

Jabber

  • Some sort of jabber web interface would be nice. Perhaps this could be added as a module in the side of the webmail and boards clients? (To borrow ideas from a certain large search company).

The littler jobs

Wiki

Wiki needs to be skinned.

The main website

  • This is currently an unmaintainable mess. It's not fecking 1995 anymore, we should have some sort of web framework powering this, and it should be editable by any member of the committee.

Calendar

I think it'd be cool if each redbrick member had a calendar that integrated with redbrick events, and DCU's timetables. Everyone has a personal calendar, like. They can choose to share the calendar among RB members or keep it private- useful for a few people for, say, scheduling committee meetings. If enough people used it, societies and clubs could post events to it too, and people could add themselves to the event, and have it show up in their calendar.

Launch page

Assuming some of the other stuff was implemented, there could be a redbrick launch page, say "home.redbrick.dcu.ie" or something. User sets this to be their homepage, autologins are set up on that page only, and it gives them a dashboard of information. For example, "Good morning werdz, You have a 9am lecture in T101 (CA165, Computer Programming 1, Charlie Daly). You have 14 new emails.", etc.

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