This website was created in October of 2004 by a freshman on our team named Rajeev.  In addition to being one of our three student programmers that year, he managed our team forums and updated the site with team bios, announcements, and other important information.  The main focus of the site at that point was as a collaboration tool, using the forums to communicate ideas on fundraising, robot design, and as a calendar of upcoming team events.

Before 1511 went to Championships in Atlanta, Rajeev put in some long hours and moved the website to the overall design you see today.  Since then, the website team has focused on adding content and tools to make the team's life easier and more productive.  Rather than reinventing the website every year with a different look and feel, each year our site becomes more useful to our team and to others.

The website backend is written in PHP, and is driven in a CMS-type fashion. All pages are generated from a MySQL database, and inserted into a standard template that defines the top, side, and bottom of the site. This CMS was written by Rajeev in his freshman year, and it allows students and mentors who are not HTML or PHP experts to edit the website easily. We have adopted TinyMCE as our graphical editor, so that anyone can easily make new pages, add announcements, or update current content. 

Here are some other interesting facts and features of this site!

In use since 2005, our team has used Subversion as a code repository and versioning system to help our programmers work more effectively.  SVN allows all students to contribute code while not being afraid to "break" anything, since errors can easily be rolled back or compared to working code.  Mentors can more easily compare student code to the original to help them work out bugs, and team members can work independently on the same source files.  SVN is a common tool used by real companies, and students who become more familiar with code versioning are better prepared for software development in industry.  You can find our SVN repository and our Robot Code on our website!

Our website forums run on the Simple Machines Forum PHP codebase.  Using a free and open source forum, rather than writing one ourselves, keeps the site safer from security risks and features a wealth of capabilities like our Team calendar and easy updates.  Students can moderate their own subteam forums to add/correct mistakes in collaboration, and often just to have fun in our epic picture war threads! 

Since its creation in 2005, the forums have accumulated over 11,000 posts in 3000 topics by nearly 300 members.

Our team Wiki is run on the popular MediaWiki codebase, similar to that of the popular Wikipedia.  New to our team for the 2008-2009 season, our Wiki was primarily used as a collaboration tool during build season.  We switched to a Wiki format from using the forums for build season due to how difficult it became to sift through large amounts of information on the forums, as well keeping track of what information was old or new.  Using a Wiki, the students were once again empowered to add, edit, and delete information on the website without fear of losing or breaking anything.  All information on the Wiki is versioned, so any mistakes can be rolled back and versions compared to one another.  For team tasks such as shopping lists, Engineering Notebooks, and our Robot Design page, a Wiki proved superior to forum collaboration. 

Happily enough, our Wiki was mentioned in the 2009 Chairman's Award speech at Chesapeake!

Being a student on Team 1511 isn't always the easiest job. All students are required to complete a set of Achievements that are listed in our Student Handbook. If students complete all their achievements, they will have the maximum amount of their trip paid for by the team. Students who complete some or no achievements will pay the full cost of any trips.

Achievements are designed to motivate our students to become better citizens through community service, inspire others to become interested in math, science, and engineering through helping at demos, and to finance the team's activities through various fundraising efforts. The Achievements progress is tracked using an online system. Our mentors can enter student Achievement data using a simple form, and at any time our members can log into the website using their forums account information and check what they've done.

New to our website this year, the Blog is a day-to-day account of the team's trials, tribulations, and successes during build season.  Written by our long-time mentor Cynette, the blog is a humorous and honest look at how our robot comes to be.  Our blog is also a great way to record the team's history, which will be fantastic when looking at how far we've come after each year.

Part of our team communication is in the form of a weekly email from our student leaders. Our emails are well structured to make it easier for members to read, and the layout is consistent from week to week. The idea behind the weekly email was to make sure everyone is aware of the coming week's tasks and events, as well as to recognize students and mentors for accomplishments that have taken place. Our sponsors are also part of our team emails, which let them keep track of what we are doing, and how their donations directly impact the students and the community.

Here are some features we're currently working on:

• Online testing/training-Students can search through many FIRST related presentations. Mentors can create an online test using a simple set of forms. They can then assign the test to various students using the achievement system. This would come in handy during pre-season and post-season when subteams are training their students (or even new mentors!).  Currently mentors can create tests, students can view them, but the automatic grading has not been completed yet.
• Photo gallery highlights-Tighter integration with our Smugmug photo gallery, and the ability to pull random or top viewed photos onto our media page.  Smugmug is a great photo hosting site, with their own API that you can use to tie your website and Smugmug together.