Nov 17, 2020
MUnite
Hello internet.
In this blog, I will be sharing the details of my 7th semester capstone project. The capstone project I undertook is called MUnite. It is the combination of two words i.e. MUN + Unite.
Basically, it is a platform which would help in organising and participating in MUNs.
First things first, I should explain what an MUN is. It is not widely popular but it is on the rise of popularity surely. Let’s start with the full form of MUN . MUN stands for Model United Nations. Now we all know what United Nations or better known as UN is. MUN is like a simulation of UN which is very popular amongst college and school students. Every participant is given a country to represent and prepare accordingly with respect to agenda.
Now I’ll try to explain my project. A lot of processes in MUN are done manually or are semi-automated. We are trying to make a platform where every user can post about their event and use the platform to market it. Every event before organising has to go through a lot of planning. A lot of things have to be decided. From how many number of committees will be there to what those committees would be. How many registrations would be there and what would be the registration fees. There are a large number of variables involved, and mostly organisations tend to create their personal websites to advertise these events, and take registrations through google forms.
This has done the job till now, but the aim of our project was not to fully automate this project, but to also create a platform where people can form a community and advertise their MUNs.
Technologies Used
My team decided to work using Django which is a framework in Python since we were already well acquainted with Python. We used Bootstrap, JavaScript, JQuery as other languages involved in the development.
However, since this was my first proper web development project, I had a lot of learning to do.
The first three weeks of my timeline were invested into learning Django. I learned a lot by practically executing tasks. Things like creating models, views, the system for URLs in Django really intrigued me while learning it.
User Interface
My teammate was incharge of the front-end aspect of the project. However since he was also inexperience, we both ended up contributing in front-end as well as back-end.
Here are a few screenshots of the UI of our website.
Classes Involved
We made sure we used classes and applied concepts of object oriented programming through out our project. We had 3 major classes, which were —
1. Delegate
2. Event
3. Committee
The relationship between Event and Delegate is a many to one relationship i.e. one delegate may organise multiple events.
The relationship between Committee and Event is also many to one relationship since an event can have multiple committees.
Here is an initially developed class diagram which was made in the first few weeks of the project —
Finally I would like to thank my teammate involved in the process of making this project. I learned a lot working on this project and it was definitely a lot of fun creating a product out of nothing and only from your idea. I have always loved MUNs as they are fun to take part in and help you improve your general knowledge. I plan to keep working on this project and include more modules and features so that the platform becomes more and more advanced and eventually could be deployed into the real world.
You can check out the code in our github repo at https://github.com/Sriraag/MUnite
Thanks for reading… :)
