Highlawn Group provides online application development services to clients of varying size. If you are interested in our services, please contact David.
Campus Events is Highlawn Group's online community calendaring system for large institutions. A very early and basic version of the application runs events@penn, a Web site operated by The Daily Pennsylvanian at the University of Pennsylvania. The below information describes the current version of Campus Events.
If you would like to see the current version of Campus Events or have any inquiries, please contact David.
Campus Events brings many of the features available in standard desktop calendars to a community-oriented paradigm. The application is designed for large institutions -- high schools, colleges, universities, news organizations and even local governments -- with several or more groups, organizations and departments holding events on a regular basis.
Many of our competitors' solutions function a lot like personal calendars and are too basic, too limited.
Campus Event's intuitive front-end allows end-users to easily find what they are looking for. Indeed, the entire interface holds up well even when the system is hosting many event listings. Events are color-coded by category. And hover-over tooltips provide detailed event information without requiring click-throughs. A variety of options and controls allow the user to limit the events shown to his or her interests. Events can currently be exported to Facebook, Google Calendar and the industry-standard iCalendar (.ics) format.
Administrator-maintained lists highlight special events and bring them to the attention of users (e.g. a "featured events" list).
By default, the application allows for user-submitted events from the front-end under a trusted domain model. All events submitted this way are automatically verified by e-mail. Event listings confirmed with email addresses from administrator-specified domains (e.g. "john.smith@school.edu") are activated immediately. Others require moderation. Event organizers can edit their listings post-submission using unique access tokens.
We believe that, for most uses, the trusted domain model significantly lowers the barrier to entry and encourages submissions while sufficiently preventing abuse. However, user-submitted event are easy to disable or put behind a built-in authentication system.
With Campus Events, we have made it very easy to run multiple versions of a calendar from the same codebase as distinct sites. For instance, a school may wish to publish a calendar viewable by the public, a separate calendar for its intranet, and yet another set aside specifically for students. These calendars may have distinct designs and show events from different, but perhaps overlapping, sets of categories.
Campus Events' administrative interface is just as clean and easy to use as its front-end. Administrators have the ability to fine-tune much of the application from the back-end because, where possible, we avoid the use of configuration files.
Administrators may export data out of Campus Events in XML-format for import into recent versions of Adobe InDesign. This feature was designed with publications in mind. It is also relevant to organizations with newsletters.
Our authentication system, which has been used in several other projects and applications, is secure and powerful. Permissions determine whether each page of the application has unrestricted access, implicit access (simple authentication check) or explicit access. These permissions can differ for each site. Users are assigned to sites and to roles, which specify the permissions they possess.
The user management system can be replaced with a variety of enterprise-grade alternatives while preserving the broad functionality of sessions, roles and permissions. For example, we can adapt the application to work with CoSign.
The look and feel of Campus Events can largely be customized via CSS. We provide licensees with the Photoshop source files for all our graphics should they wish to change them. In addition, licensees are permitted to create and use a variation of the Campus Events trademark and logo.
Campus Events was written from scratch in PHP and consists of over 10,000 lines of code. The application is built on top of the CodeIgniter framework and strictly adheres to the model-view-controller design paradigm. Although the application is flexible and robust, the underlying code is well-refined, even simple. In-line comments are used frequently throughout and external documentation explains how everything fits together. Licensees are completely welcome to modify Campus Events to suit their unique needs.
Campus Events licensees are fully permitted to access and modify the underlying source code of the application. We prohibit only the distribution of the source code and other acts that would be considered a misappropriation of our intellectual property.
Each license is perpetual and includes 1 year of updates, 6 months of basic support (help getting the application running and using it) and 6 months of limited support (help rectifying any unexpected application problems).
We are selling Campus Events such that even an organization of modest means can afford it. Our pricing scheme will be loosely tiered based on institution size but will fall within a very narrow range. For more information, please contact David.
Because the application's only requirements are PHP and any SQL server, its ongoing operation and maintenance costs are quite low. Moreover, our source-available licensing allows licensees to modify the application for their own needs independently -- another potential cost savings.
Under a standard work order arrangement, we can provide customizations for Campus Events at low billing rates. For more information, please contact David.