GEWISWEB - The GEWIS Website

GEWISWEB is the website created by and for the members of GEWIS — GEmeenschap van Wiskunde en Informatica Studenten.

Features

The GEWIS website provides its members and other visitors with lots of functionality:

• Activities:

  • Create activities with a wide range of options for sign-up lists.
  • Enables members to sign up for various events and activities, enhancing engagement and participation.

• Companies:

  • Allows companies that collaborate with GEWIS to publish job vacancies and opportunities.
  • Facilitates connections between students and potential employers, aiding in career development.

• Decisions:

  • Provides a platform for members to view and interact with decisions and meetings.
  • Ensures transparency and member involvement in the decision-making process.

• Education:

  • Offers an extensive archive of course documents, including exams and summaries.
  • Serves as a valuable resource for students looking to study or review past materials.

• Pages:

  • Custom pages created by the board to provide dynamic content.
  • Allows for flexible and timely updates to information and announcements.

• Photos:

  • Maintains a comprehensive photo archive of the numerous activities organised by GEWIS.
  • Helps preserve and share memories of events and gatherings with the community.

And there is plenty more! GEWISWEB continuously evolves to meet the needs of the association's members, offering a broad array of tools and features to enrich their time at the university.

Getting Started

GEWISWEB is built on PHP and the Laminas MVC framework. The Laminas MVC framework provides a solid foundation for building scalable and maintainable web applications.

Prerequisites

We recommend developing natively on a Linux machine or through WSL2 on Windows (note: Arch-based distributions are not recommended) with the PhpStorm IDE or another IDE with good IntelliSense support for PHP.

You will need at least:

• docker and docker compose (make sure that you have enabled Buildkit)
• gettext utilities
• git
• make
• A .po file editor (e.g. POEdit)

Some of the make commands run natively on your machine; as such, you may also need to install PHP itself (use the ondrej/php PPA for apt to get the latest version) and composer.

Installation

To set up GEWISWEB locally, follow these steps:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Clone your fork (git clone git@github.com:{username}/gewisweb.git).
3. Copy the .env.dist file to .env and alter the file to your needs.
4. Run make rundev to build and serve the website (this may take 5-10 minutes).
5. Run make migrate and make seed to get some test data.
6. Go to http://localhost/ in your browser and you are greeted with the GEWIS website.
7. Log in with membership number 8000 and the password gewiswebgewis.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from the community, especially GEWIS members! To contribute:

1. Perform the steps from Installation.
2. Create your feature of bug fix branch (git switch -c feature/my-amazing-feature).
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'feat: added my amazing feature').
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/my-amazing-feature).
5. Open a pull request.

More detailed information on GEWIS' contribution guidelines, including conventions on branch names and commit messages, can be found here.

Project Structure

A general overview of important folders required for the functioning of the website:

./
├── config                  # Global configuration files for the website.
├── data                    # Persistent private data-related files, such as cryptographic keys and logs.
├── docker                  # Docker-related files to construct the containers.
├── module                  # Contains the modules that make up the website, each providing specific features.
└── public                  # Publicly accessible files, including the entry point (index.php).

We make use of the Model-View-Controller framework. Generally speaking, the model layer is responsible for the interaction with the database and data manipulation. Next, the view layer is responsible for rendering data into a web page. The controller is responsible for processing the request and interacts with the model and view layer to provide a response.

To make development easier (and due to how the Laminas MVC framework works) we add some extra layers and arrive at a structure for each module that looks like this:

./
├── config
│   └── module.config.php   # Contains routing information and other module specific configurations.
├── src
│   ├── Command             # CLI commands.
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── Controller          # Entrypoint for requests to the website, some light processing takes place here before using a specific service.
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── Form                # Specification and validation of forms based on entities.
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── Mapper              # Doctrine ORM repositories to access the underlying database and mapping entities to that data.
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── Model               # Doctrine ORM entities.
│   │   └── ...
│   └── Service             # Services contain the core logic related to specific entities (or sets of entities) and do most of the processing.
│   │   └── ...
├── test                    # Test files for this module, such as unit tests.
│   ├── Seeder              # Data fixtures to seed the database with data for this module.
│   │   └── ...
│   └── ...
└── view                    # All template files ("views") made out of HTML and PHP code, used by controllers for output.
    └── ...

The Application module has two additional folders:

• language containing the translation files (make translations to update them).
• migrations containing database migrations.

License

This software is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0), see LICENSE.