Developed for the "Database and Web Applications Lab" course, the Overview project is an information system with a web interface for a collaborative news platform. The system stores information about the readers’ community as well as the news submitted by contributors, including votes and comments.
It is possible to search and read news articles, as well as sharing them through other social networks – such as Facebook and Twitter. In order to create, comment and vote on news articles, one must join the community.
A news article falls under a predefined category and is composed of a title, a summary of its content, an image (or a gallery, if need be) and a main body. If an error is detected, the article can be reported, so that it can be reviewed. Being part of the community, one can establish a relationship with other members, so one can follow their activities – articles, likes and dislikes.
Users can interact with the system in three distinct ways, with different privileges and responsibilities.
As a visitor, one can search users and news articles, as well as reading and sharing them. One can join the community by registering and signing in.
In addition to searching and reading news, once signed in one can – as a contributor – create and manage their own news articles, as well as commenting and voting on both news articles and comments. Reporting inappropriate comments or an error on a given article and establishing relationships with other users are features only available to users that have signed in.
As a moderator, one is responsible for reviewing articles and comments reported by other users. As such, moderators also have permission to remove any comment, news article or registered user that does not comply with the terms of use.
The system administrator acts as a moderator as well, with the added responsibility of managing the platform’s moderators – promoting or demoting them to and from that position. Additionally, the system administrator has permission to add or edit news’ categories on the website.
PHP was used as a language for producing dynamic web pages and PostgreSQL as a database management system.