The department homepage needed to sport an ever-changing variety of content, showing off the current news and events, advertising upcoming seminars, perhaps giving a detailed profile of a randomly chosen faculty member or student — all independent content that just happens to belong on the same page.
To facilitate this, I crafted the notion of a "Homepage Feature".
The homepage dynamically loads any content found in the
features directory, and arranges each page there as box
on the homepage.
A feature can be as simple as a block of static HTML advertising a unique upcoming event, or can use arbitrarily complex PHP to produce dynamic content, perhaps changing automatically on a daily or weekly basis.
In the demonstration site, the homepage sports a News feature, and a separate Seminars feature, with both pulling data from the core "CS Website" database.
Example Feature (saved as features/example.php):
<?php $title = 'Example Feature'; ?> <p>This is an example feature, with just a simple paragraph of text. To be more dynamic, it can use arbitrary PHP and can access the core database for the CS site.</p>
Because the site always displays everything found in the
features directory, the webmaster doesn't need to do
anything besides add a new file there to add a new section to the homepage.