Introduction

The RPI System Administrators are responsible for maintaining the off-campus housing website. At RPI, there isn't any real off-campus office, so the program needs to be able to essentially maintain itself in terms of listings and such since the Administrators don't really have a lot of time to dedicate to this.

The Existing Program

The existing off-campus housing website (http://offcampus.union.rpi.edu) is written with ASP 1.x and is extremely difficult to use. Some of the problems identified are:

• Terrible navigation and broken links
• Guest accounts must be requested by E-Mail and manually created in a database
• Not integrated with CAS
• Many out of date listings
• Difficult interface for landlords and students
• Not very configurable – most options are hardcoded
• Ugly

Plans For the New One

The new application being developed includes several new features that will allow for easy portability across different campuses. Once the project matures a little, the functionality may be extended so it will work for regions rather than simply schools (following the Facebook mentality).

• Based on PHP 5 with MySQL backend
• CSS based, themeable design allowing easy portability to other campuses
• Several static classes that act as managers for site content (like Authentication, Database Connections, Sessions, and Menus)
• Separate interfaces for Students/Guests, Landlords, and Administrators
• Configurable options for the listings (ability to dynamically edit the form)
• Integration with Concerto
• Visual representation of listings using Google Maps

The project also includes a number of base libraries that can be adopted for other projects. It essentially uses a scaled down version of the WISP Framework, which is being developed concurrently with this project.