CTE Website

Our goal for this project was to work on recreating the CTE website in order to improve the maintenance capabilities for the administrator and to fix the flaws of the site. The CTE program at Virginia Tech stands for Computational Tissue Engineering, which is an interdisciplinary graduate education program focused on the convergence of multiple scientific disciplines, with the goal of driving advances in tissue engineering. The site is split into sections that cover the Research, News, and Events of the program as well as an archive of the Faculty, Students, and Alumni of the program. The site was created with a CMS called Basecamp over 10 years ago. Because so much time had passed, it became difficult to do maintenance on the underlying code. This was mainly due to the fact that Basecamp was developed with PHP, and the specific version of PHP that the CMS was originally developed on had become outdated. This was the reason our client, Dr. Murali, who is the Associate Program Director of the CTE program, tasked us with recreating the site, as it had become too difficult to maintain the site. The new site was built with many of the deliverables that had been discussed with Dr. Murali. In the completed site, the admin has the ability to dictate permissions to other users, including the ability to grant editing privileges. Student profiles that were entered into the site can easily be changed to alumni profiles. Although pages for the site cannot be toggled on and off, they can be functionally disabled and enabled within the WordPress Dashboard. New entries of profiles, such as students, would automatically be displayed on the site. The site could recognize different categories of data including “people” entries. The admin has the ability to preview pages when making changes. Fields can be changed to be a list of data types within certain editors. The admin also has the ability to create forms on the site.