SI 631

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.)

Instructors

Prof. Paul Resnick, presnick@umich.edu

Prof. Mark Ackerman, ackerm@umich.edu

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.

Students should take SI634 concurrently or demonstrate basic competence with configuring (but not programming) the drupal platform. SI634
is a 1.5-credit half-semester course on configuring various application platforms, including drupal. In that course, 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, a follow-on to 634 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 mornings, 9AM-noon. 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.
Some clients will be local to Ann Arbor. Others will not; some may even be outside of the country. We are trying to line up funding for students to travel to visit remote clients, either during the semester or during Spring Break, but can not guarantee this.

For some of the projects, we also hope to line up outside mentors from some of the consulting firms that provide CMS design and implementation services.

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.