About the website of MPLA

A lot of work has been done and is still being done in order to provide you with up-to-date information and to eliminate unnecessary bureaucratic and administrative procedures. For any questions, suggestions, requests, etc. you can contact Thanos, our webmaster.

for our students...

While being logged in with your student account, you have access to the "My MSc/PhD student" section and its subsections:

• Studies. This is an overview of your courses, grades, etc.
• Thesis. Once you have informed us about your thesis, you gain access to this part, which you can use to keep your thesis details up to date, as well as to upload your thesis.
• Course registration. While a course registration period is open, this menu item becomes available and you use it to create a courselist for the running semester. Once you finalize your selection, the director of studies will inspect it for approval.
• Checklist. Your checklist constitutes a very important part of the website. Choose a specialty for your studies and keep track of your remaining requirements for graduation. Once everything has been fulfilled, you use the checklist again to apply for graduation.

for our teachers and teaching assistants...

Once you are logged in you gain access to the "My teacher" section of the website, through which, for each course that you are currently teaching, you can access the following applications:

• Course details. A few basic details regarding your course.
• Enrolled students. A list of all enrolled students, along with some information about them.
• Schedule. Use this to keep the schedule updated. Make sure you edit it when something changes in the weekly schedule, when there are extra lectures on specific dates or cancellations of lectures, etc.
• Diary. You can use this small application to keep a diary of what has been covered in each lecture.
• Handouts. If you are giving handout exercises to your class, you can use this to inform your students about them, their deadlines, post solutions, etc.
• Exams. Once you have any kind of information regarding an examination of your course (mid-term exam, final exam, or september exam), use this to inform your students (and our system!) about it.
• Results. For each exam that has passed, a list of participating students will appear, waiting for you to grade each of them. Use it to send the students' grades to the secretariat. (This is only available for teachers, not for teaching assistants.)

coming soon

Currently, most "pdf" versions of pages are not working, and the same is true for the iCalendar links for the events of MPLA. This is due to some limitations of our hardware; soon these will be overcome and all features of our website will become fully functional.

Technical details

A few technical words by MPLA's webmaster.

hardware

Currently the website is running on an HP Proliant DL360 server.

software

The website of MPLA was created using only free and open source software. Our server runs the OpenBSD operating system, and the webservers serving you are instances of nginx. We are using PostgreSQL as the main database server, and SQLite for some configuration data as well as some development/testing records.

The main part of the website is written in Python using the custom-built framework schole, which in turn runs on top of the Django web framework. A preliminary, pre-alpha version of schole powers the website of the School of Civil Engineering of NTUA, since October 2010 (hence the similarity in the design). However, a lot has changed in schole since then, and once I am satisfied with its completeness and stability I plan to release it on my website.

Some periodic maintenance programs as well as all the parsers were written in Haskell and Ruby. Some logic programming was also used for verifying the students' checklist application; it was written in Prolog.

Every line of code, configuration, and text was written in vim, and kept track of with darcs.

I hope it will serve you well...

Thanos Tsouanas.