Postgrad Assignment

Since I strongly believe that IT should make people’s life easier, I came up with the idea to design a website where tickets for Bond events, especially the ones hosted by the Student Council, can be bought. the long queues even in this slow semester are a reason why at least part of the available tickets should be able online. In addition to that, I assume it would make life easier for the members of the student council since they don’t need to show up on multiple days until al the tickets are sold. Even if only the remaining tickets would be sold online, it would be a convenient service.

The site would obviously contain basic shop elements (either realized with PayPal or manually) and needs several control mechanism:

- user authentication (Student ID)

- check if tickets are available

- Payment method

- Purchase history

- Receipt by email or print from purchase history

- RSS to inform students about upcoming events

…

When I started thinking about the project I started to sketch the index page with Photoshop and this is my result so far. If the project gets approval, I’ll start converting the Photoshop sketch into a CSS layout.

Layout Demo for Postgrad Assignment

The Form Tag

The form tag, obviously, creates a form within a website. Those forms contain textfields, radio buttons, checkboxes, and other elements that a user can manipulate and finally submit to communicate with a server, send a search request and many other things. Here’s an example that contains the typical elements of a form, Simple Form Example.

If you take a look at the source code you’ll notice that form action tag contains the url where the form data is being send to. As I said the before, it’s a very basic form, the only tricky part (not really but I had some problems with that way back) is that if you have radio buttons and you want the user to be limited to make only one selection (otherwise you’d use checkboxes) make sure that the “id” is the same except for a number counting upwards for every possible selection:

…id=”Selection_1″
…id=”Selection_2″
…

If the id’s not matching the form will allow users to make more than one selection. If you want to learn more about forms simply check out a tutorial website like Pixel2Life and try one of the PayPal form tutorials. They contain a lot of different issues and have “real world” touch.