Student Organization Web Sites

Engineering student organizations have their own http://students.engr.ncsu.edu vhost and are organized under it as students.engr.ncsu.edu/organization.

The purpose of this common hub is to provide web resources that foster collaboration and information-sharing across student organizations in the college.

Procedure for Setting Up a Student Organization Web Site

Contact the college web coordinator at engr-webmaster AT ncsu.edu and request a web site for your organization. Please provide the following:

• Unity ID of organization's faculty or staff sponsor, the locker owner.
• Locker name for your organization, e.g., swe, e-council (lowercase, no spaces).
• Unity IDs of students who need access to the locker as administrators and editors.

You will receive email when your web locker is created with the site's:

• URL: students.engr.ncsu.edu/locker/, e.g., students.engr.ncsu.edu/e-council/
• Path: /afs/eos/engrwww/sites/students.engr/locker/, e.g., /afs/eos/engrwww/sites/students.engr/e-council/

Locker Owner: Who Can Request and Own a Student Organization Web Site

The request for a student organization web locker and URL must be made by a college web administrator, either Ellen McDaniel or Margaret Hudacko.  They can be contacted at engr-webmaster AT ncsu.edu or eoshelp AT ncsu.edu.

However, the space itself has to have a staff or faculty "owner," usually the organization's faculty sponsor. This person is ITECS's long-term point of contact for the web site since student membership turns over frequently. Students can work through the faculty sponsor or college web administrators to request additional quota, change permissions on the locker, request a database, etc. 

Site Path, URL, and Permissions

The first part of the path, /afs/eos/engrwww/sites/students.engr/, is the same for all student organization web sites. Be sure that "sites" is in your pathname! (If you are on a Windows lab computer, /afs is the J: drive.)

Path to locker:
/afs/eos/engrwww/sites/students.engr/locker/
e.g.,
/afs/eos/engrwww/sites/students.engr/e-council/

URL:
http://students.engr.ncsu.edu/organization
e.g.,
http://students.engr.ncsu.edu/e-council

Most groups want web sites with short URLs, which are easy to remember and publish. Only one URL per site is supported! In most cases, the locker is mounted directly under the vhost to give it a short URL, e.g., students.engr.ncsu.edu/locker. ITECS also recommends lowercase URLs without spaces and underscores.

A typical web-locker access control list (ACL) looks like the one below for http://students.engr.ncsu.edu/swe/. The locker-specific path, permission groups, and owner are in bold:

/afs/eos/engrwww/sites/students.engr/swe/ % fs la
Access list for . is
Normal rights:
students_engr-swe-www:wwwread rl
students_engr-swe-www:wwwedit rlidwk
students_engr-swe-www rlidwk
students_engr-www rl
itecs-admin:lockeraudit rl
engr:www-servers rlidwk
itecs-admin:webadmins rl
system:administrators rlidwka
laurab rlidwk

Only the owner is listed by UnityID on the ACL (must be faculty or staff). The Unity IDs of all students needing access to the site are placed in locker-specific pts groups, which have the following settings:

• Owner: laurab is the faculty/staff owner with write (rlidwk) access. The owner can request quota and add/remove people to/from any of the following groups through the LOCKER PORTAL.
• Admin Group: students_engr-swe-www is the administrators group with write (rlidwk) access. No "a" rights (rlidwka) are granted or needed with this configuration.
• Edit Group: students_engr-swe-www:wwwedit is the editors group with write access (rlidwk).
• Read Group: students_engr-swe-www:wwwread is a rarely used, read-only group of people with read-look (rl) permission to use/copy files from the site, such as templates, images, etc.

Tools for Creating and Updating Sites

At http://students.engr.ncsu.edu/tools/ are tools that student organizations can use for creating and posting news, announcements, events, surveys, minutes, member directories, etc.

If you intend to use PHP, MySQL, WRAP, or the webtest server, please contact eoshelp AT ncsu.edu to learn what the restrictions are and how best to implement them.

In addition, if you need tools for creating your site, ITECS recommends the Adobe software in all of the Eos and Unity Windows labs: Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, and Photoshop. Also in those labs is LIFT for Dreamweaver for accessibility checking. See the Software Catalog for more information on these and other applications. If you are working in these applications in the labs, you can simply save files you create into live web space using the path:

J:(afs) -> eos.ncsu.edu  -> engrwww -> sites -> students.engr -> locker

Are You Moving from an Old Site?

If you have been maintaining web content elsewhere, e.g., http://www.ncsu.edu/sorc/, you should review your content and what is running at your old site before moving it to engineering space. Most sites need a cleanup; old and out-of-date content should be deleted or placed in an archive. You may have some broken links after the move if your site used symlinks or absolute path references to site files. Go through the site and check links, update content, and get feedback and suggestions from the members of your organization.

Alert visitors who may go to your former site that the URL has changed, and contact those with links to your old URL to update their links. Work through Engineers' Council http://students.engr.ncsu.edu/e-council/ to learn how best to start and maintain an organization web site and use available tools.