INFS7202
Project Milestone 1

Student ID: s4602440
Name: Zeng Zhi























1
• Introduction
This project is designed based on the idea of online discussion platform such as edstem and
stackoverflow. The purpose of creating this online discussion platform is as follow. To provide
a more comprehensive online platform for students to communicate with each other. For
instance, when students using edstem to discuss course related topic, they are rarely review the
online forum again after they completed the course. Besides, the content on edstem is course
oriented. Hence, this project aims to build an online discussion platform which is similar to
edstem but with more comprehensive functionality.

• Objective
The goal of this project is a functionable online discussion platform. Which means it will need
to be deployed on a public host. In this case, I choose to use UQzone provided by the university
instead of other public server such as Apache since I have experience on using university server
before. As for the framework selection, since the project will be hosting on the university server,
the coding language will be mainly based on php, html, CSS, and JavaScript. Hence, I will
choose CodeIgniter as the MVC framework to manipulate the communication between the
model and controller. And bootstrap framework to make the view look nicer for the users. Since
the project is related to online forum, it required users to sign up, login and logout. Therefore,
database is necessary. In this project, I will use MySQL as the database.

In the functionality part, the main function provided in this project will be posting a topic and
replying to this topic. This function will require MySQL as the database to store the users’ post
and reply and display on the webpage. The next main functionality of this project is the
registration such as sign up, login and logout. This function requires php to communicate with
the database to store the user’s information. Hence, it will need php and MySQL to achieve
this. In addition, the users would not like to perform the login action every time when they are
browsing the forum, hence, I will create session for users who are logged in. Also, there will
be cookies for users who like to customize their browsing experience, for example, the dark
color on the background. And the cookies will be achieved by using php. There will be search
box for user as well. It will be based on JavaScript and AJAX. Users can search the topic they
like, if there isn’t, it will display the message indicate there aren’t any result, otherwise, it will
display the most relevant result, for example, when user type “A/a”, it will show the post which
contain “A/a” inside. There also will be functions that can allow users to rate and bookmark
the post, moreover, the user can check his/her view history. The functions mentioned before
can be achieved by letting users to click the buttons, then the php model will pass the data
through the database to store the rating and bookmark. Finally, there will be recommend
function in this online forum. The way to achieve this is using php model and MySQL to search
for the most viewed post on the database, and display to the users.

Beside all these main functions, if I am skillful enough, I will add additional function inside
the project, such as use TensorFlow to create a better recommend function by using the K-NN
based algorithm. And other API such as integrated google map.

2
• UI/UX design
The UI/UX design will mostly refer to the appendix below.
1. Index page: Refer to figure 1 in the appendix. There is navigation bar, search bar and
login and sign-up button on the index page.
2. Index page after logged in: Refer to figure 2 in the appendix. It will show the user been
logged in, and the bookmark on the topics.
3. Login page: Refer to figure 3 in the appendix. Just simple login page.
4. Post page: Refer to figure 4 in the appendix. There will be text box, submit and cancel
button on this page. Moreover, there will have some category buttons for user to select
which can relate to their topic.
5. Reply page: Refer to figure 5 in the appendix. There will be text boxes for user to view
and reply to the topic. In addition, this page also shows the time stamp, how many views,
how many replies and the rating of each reply of this post. The user can also click the
pin button to bookmark this post.
6. Sign up page: Refer to figure 6 in the appendix. This page just a simple sign-up page
for users. It contains some text boxes for user to type in information. Moreover, it has
some buttons for submit and cancel function.

• Timeline
The timeline for this project is indicated on the following table.

Tasks Completed date (supposed to be) Due date
Model, view, controller
(index, login, MySQL)
Before Apr-10 Week 6
Model, view, controller
(Sign up, search, MySQL)
Before Apr-14 Week 7
Post and reply page Before Apr-25 Mid-Break
Bookmark, views, replies,
and try some advance
functions
Before Apr-29 Week 8
Submit Before A2 due date Week 9 (A2 due)
(No assess to zone)
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12 (A3 due)







3

Appendix


Figure 1. Index page


Figure 2. Index page after logged in


4


Figure 3. Login page


Figure 4. Page for user to post a topic





5


Figure 5. Page for user to reply to a post


Figure 6. Sign up page