What would you like to see in a student community site?

talk random
1

I’m planning on a trial by fire with ASP.net.
I’m going to make a huge student community site with many different features and completely customizable to the user’s preferences and themes.
I’ve got a list of about 30 different features I want to incorporate into this thing, but am running out of ideas. So I’m curious what you guys would like to see in a site like that.

Just imagine its your college’s website and go crazy thinking of the coolest stuff.

Thanks in advance.

2

I would highly advise you to fully understand ASP.net before making a project of that magnitude.

I actually work for a university, so feel free to list off everything you’ve thought of so far. The biggest thing in making something like this is that it has to run with very minimum admin guidance.

3

I’ve got a book that guides me step by step through making an online community. I plan to use it to make some crap site. I think that’ll give me the basis to understanding ASP.net. Then I’m going to make all the components separate (and ugly). Once I’ve got all of them, I’ll design a second crap site, figure out how to put all these components together. And lastly, redesign the school community and put it all together very carefully and clean.

I actually work for a university

Really? Which one and what do you do? If you don’t mind me asking…

…feel free to list off everything you’ve thought of so far.

I left the list/design at home, but from what I can remember of it, I plan on making a news site that you can organize, track stories, submit news to; a huge subcommunity of groups that you can organize, browse, search, join, create, etc.; a homework section that will keep up with your assignments and will be automatically be created when you sign up for all your classes. It will update you everytime you get a homework assignment. You will be able to organize your assignments, mark them complete, incomplete, or in need of attention; e-mail with built in un-deleteable folders “Classes”, “School”, “Events”, etc. It will also be organize-able with folder creation/deletion/etc.; a dock/undockable IM system that can have groups/folders, drag/drop organization, search/browse/invite, appear invisible/away; an avatar generator which will create a facial avatar and a pixelated avatar. It will have many different options and hopefully your avatar won’t look like anyone else’s. Of course you can always use a picture of yourself; blogs out the arse with nearly unlimited customability and incredibly easy to use/update, a networking feature will go along with these like Groups in MySpace or Xanga. I’m sure I’ll think of a lot of stuff to go with the blogs…; personal photo galleries that can be organized/sorted/browsed/searched/linked to (a la Flickr ripoff)/etc.
This could go on for days, but you get the idea of how expansive I want to make this and how if I did this right and kept a code template for it, I could make a sweet community system that I could apply to a ton of things. Maybe even my own gasp CMS.

The biggest thing in making something like this is that it has to run with very minimum admin guidance.

Yeah, people are dumb and things get unorganized quick when they’re left in charge. I’d like to make this really easy for students to use and risk a little in the theme department. IE: Rather than let them move entire blocks of the site around, just let them color code everything they want. I dunno.

It’ll be super hard, but I’m bored and have always wanted to get into server-side stuff.
Tell me what you think.

4

Western Michigan University… but nothing I do can be really seen its all the back end administration for online courses and stuff. I’ve said it many times its not that most exciting job.

I will actually will be producing an event system very close to what your talking about next year, the way we have a lot of our administration set up is through email so no one actually has to login to anything they simply click a link and then they are instantly able to verify/deny changes. It’s a pretty nice system for administrating conferences/events form systems. But thats only one way another is to integrate a while admin feature with a constant feed of what needs to be verified/confirmed. Trust me that what the user sees is only less that 1% of what the system will actually be visible to the end user in most things.

[whisper]They actually told me to copy facebooks features and how it works… it will be a funny project if it actually gets through all the paper work.[/whisper]

5

a list of all the hoochies that will put out for a little attention.

6

lol
I’ll be sure to make that a Group and since I’ll be admin, I’ll put chicks in that group as they enroll. :slight_smile:
“Our school offers the most in depth and comprehensive listing of hoochified slut-bags in the tri-state. We make it a point in daily student life to throw things at them to keep them in that Hoochie state of mind.”

I’m sure I’d keep my job after that.

7

^Forward me that list. You should definitely have a social event calendar - keggers, raves, etc.

8

Ah, the old people in charge who can’t agree on anything. How I adore them.

9

lol. If you can get that integrated that would be awesome for open parties and such. Around here if people are behind on rent we can see about 60 people at a party at a 5 dollar charge.

[ot]@w1sh nah, its not that bad. I mean one of the specifications next year when I make it is it has to be integrated with facebook in some way (I’ll figure that all next year). Our whole university highly promotes facebook and social networking with people so. The place I work for gained so many people through facebook ads and everything we had to disable part of our online system that I spent so long making. :([/ot]

10

What part?

11

[ot]The part that lets people opt into lines to join a class if someone at the last minute cancels. The thing is that if 20 people opt in we are suppose to make a new class… yea this happened where we had so many people we didn’t have the staffing to open the classes and such so it was kind of waste of time for students to put their hopes on. If you don’t know online courses take a lot of data entering and planning to get online and there has to be a teacher on the other end grading papers ect…

Now thats an advanced CMS.[/ot]

12

I think when the school implements Sitecore and the consultants set it up they are going to do all the online class stuff. I’m really just making a user community that pulls some information from the school for the students. The school can worry about their classes…

That is, unless the consultants they’re paying really well don’t do **** and leave them with Sitecore and an ugly layout.