A new website appeared!

Finally, it is here! After more than 10 years, Scintilla is getting a completely new website. As the old website has quite a 00’s feel, DIGI (Scintilla’s committees Webteam and SOT) and the board felt it was time for a modern looking website to better present herself digitally.

After the introduction of TOM, the amount of time DIGI-members could spend on the website and digital systems of Scintilla has decreased. While attempts have been made to create a new website from scratch, they have not succeeded so far, until now. Some time ago when the board heard about Congressus, a company that hosts member databases and websites for student and study associations. After some consideration and getting in contact with other associations who use Congressus, the (90th) board of E.T.S.V. Scintilla and DIGI decided to apply for a trial version.

With this trial version DIGI could poke around in the manager that comes with Congressus to see what functionality it had. After a couple of weeks, it was determined it had enough functionality to be able to replace most of the current website and the member database, called SMART3. With this in mind, the decision was made to make the move to Congressus and finally update the website after all these years.

The MoSCoW

To make the move to the new website, a list of requirements had to be made. This was accomplished in a so-called MoSCoW. This is essentially a list of requirements and features, split up into four categories: Must, Should, Could and Won’t. DIGI and the 90th board spent an evening brainstorming about all possible features a new website could have, and afterwards splitting them up in those four categories. All items in the Must category had to be finished and working before the new site could launch; take for instance the company profiles that Scintilla is contractually obliged to have available, or the documents of the General Meetings which legally have to be available for members. The Should category encompasses all features that need to be completed as soon as possible after launch, but are not instantly crucial for running the association effectively. Examples are the beloved quotelist, which (sadly) does not receive native support in Congressus and still has to be implemented and imported from the old site, and the also beloved exam database. As you might expect, the Could label is given to functionality that is nice to have, and possible to be realised at some point. Think about things like the lyrics to cantus songs, the birthdays of Scintilla members or the “Is-the-Scintilla-Room-open?” tool which is yet to be implemented (if ever). The fourth category is Won’t. This includes all features that came up during the brainstorm session, but are simply too difficult to implement or are not inside the scope of DIGI. Sadly, Scintilla won’t be getting an “is-there-any-coffee-left-unit” on the website.

After months of hard work by DIGI and the board, all Musts have been checked off, and most of the Shoulds have been completed. Of course, not all Coulds are finished, so expect some functionality of the old website to not be complete just yet. Don’t worry: DIGI is doing their best to have them ready as soon as possible (Soon™).

SCREW

Some things are not supported by Congressus, but very important for Scintilla to keep. For those things a new project was started. This project combined has been called SCREW: Scintilla’s Congressus-based Responsive Epic Website. Up until this point SCREW’s functionality can be split up into three parts. Firstly the website has to look stylish. Though the website looks decent on its own, some improvements had to be made on the Congressus styling. This is achieved using the Custom CSS option in the manager. Apart from small improvements, the biggest influence SCREW has is that anyplace on the site you see red, it is replaced by the beautiful Scintilla Red defined as #E4002B. The second task of SCREW is to elaborate on Congressus functions by improving the standard event viewer, or adding the birthdays field on the homepage to celebrate members on their birthday.

SOFA

Scintilla has to host some of its files, like GM documents, exams or photos on its own servers, protected behind a login wall so only members can have access. To achieve this, a new program was created: Scintilla’s OAuth File Access or SOFA in short. As the availability of GM documents depends on SOFA, it was categorised as a Must for the new website.

This meant it had to be up and running properly before launching the new site. This turned out to be a bit of a challenge, as communicating with Congressus’ database meant obtaining an API-key which is only possible by forcing a board member to send an email to “Folmer van Congressus” allowing Webteam to receive such a key. As the board claims to be very busy, the sending of this request took some time.

Having received this key, some more challenges were encountered. To handle authentication between SOFA and Congressus, an open standard called OAuth is used. Congressus claims to support this, yet part of their implementation is incorrect. They do not follow the OAuth specs, making the development of SOFA significantly harder. The Webteam members tasked with the development of SOFA had to manually reverse-engineer the way Congressus implements OAuth, to then compensate for the errors in their implementation.

The New Manager

Active Scintilla members are familiar with creating events on the old website. Of course, using a different back-end, this will change drastically. From now on, anyone who wants to create an event on the new site must not only have a member account, but also a so-called Congressus Manager User account. By asking the board for an invite link, you create an account, separate from your member account on the back-end of the website. Webteam or the board will then grant you Active Member rights, giving you the possibility to create events for your committee. This makes sure people who shouldn’t have access to the member administration, don’t have those rights.

Currently there is no documentation made for active members on how to create events, but do not worry: creating corresponding entries for the Scintilla Wiki is on DIGI’s to-do list. (Of course, if you feel like helping, feel free to write up something!)

All in all DIGI is glad to have the new website up and running, and hopes you like it as well. If you haven’t seen it yet: take a look here: www.scintilla.utwente.nl. In case you find an issue with the website, there is a bug report link in the menu, but hopefully you won’t need it…