Of Course!

A Flight based front-end application for the data produced by the Programmes Plant. The application communicates with the back end system via the programmes-plant-api-php library (A thin wrapper around guzzle ). After pulling the data, the application then renders the data in a variety of views, before passing it through the pantheon templating engine in order to produce finalized markup for the University of Kent course pages.

Depends upon our Programmes Plant API PHP library which is installed using Composer.

Usage

Please refer to the current brand guidelines for use of the existing brand.

Quick Deploy.

1. Checkout the master of this app from GitHub.

2. Run composer.phar install to grab Flight and the Programmes Plant PHP API library.

3. Place where you would like it to live and rename public/config/paths.sample.php to public/config/paths.php. Set the URI of the Programmes Plant API, base path and templating engine paths inside.

4. We are using our home grown (closed source) Pantheon engine. If you are using Pantheon, copy public/config/config.sample.php to public/config/config.php. This is a file which is specific to Pantheon, and sets up some basic configuration options like the theme to use. Then add a Pantheon menu folder within the tree to allow for a left-hand navigation menu.

5. Browse to the website to see the system up and running.

Creating A Build

In order to compress the assets (CSS and JS) for a distribution (images are already optimised).

1. Install Node.js - this includes npm by default.

2. Install Grunt globally - its quite useful! npm install -g grunt or npm install -g grunt-cli for the cli version.

3. Install the dependencies of our Grunt task - npm install from directory.

4. Run Grunt - grunt from the root of this code.

Notes.

• Flight has been extended with some useful helper functions. You can find these in main/methods.php

Notes on filtering search results in the URL

the url structure is:

• campus/{campus name}
• study_mode/{mode name}
• subject_category/{category name}
• award/{award name}
• programme_type/{type}
• course_options/{option}

eg http://www.kent.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/search/subject_category/testtest/

Load Testing

This app uses Siege to load test the frontend and (some )API endpoints. The endpoints have been statically generated into the tests/siege folder. To use:

1. Install by running sudo apt-get install siege
   • Alternatively via Homebrew: brew install siege
   • On windows download Siege from here.
2. Run siege -c10 -d5 -t60S -i -f tests/siege/modules-indexes.txt where:

• -c is the number of concurrent users
• -d is the delay between hitting a URL in seconds
• -t is the time to run the load test for (S=seconds, M=minutes)
• -i randomises the URL the test grabs from the text file, simulating real traffic

Clearing

Set the following to true / false in config.php to enable / disable:

1. Clearing banner on course pages const CLEARING = false;
2. Link to previous year on undergraduate search page: const SHOW_UG_PREVIOUS_YEAR_BANNER = false;

Annual Rollover

In the Programmes Plant there's an immutable field called Disable Apply. If this is set to true then we display a link to the previous year of entry for that course. This should be done during clearing.

Licensing

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.