Status: Completed
This is the MIT prefrosh hack site. It was a spoof of the MIT Admissions site, down to details such as the structure for the URLs. It is coded with Django/Python. There will be no further development on the site.
Status: Completed
This is the MIT prefrosh hack site. It was a spoof of the MIT Admissions site, down to details such as the structure for the URLs. It is coded with Django/Python. There will be no further development on the site.
You guys really did a great job spoofing MIT admissions website! I am just curious how you exactly did it. Did you guys start from scratch? That is a tough job though. If you may, can you share the code or the skeleton of the site?
Thanks! It was actually very easy. The original intent was to build the site off of MoveableType, which is what MIT uses for the actual blogs. However, when looking at the amount of work involved, I decided to push for create the entire site from scratch and using django as a framework.
It isn’t as tough of a job as you may think. Minus the templates, the website was only a few hundred lines of code. It relies heavily on django’s built in generic views. You can see the implementation of generic views here. The models for each object were very straight-forward and have no extra functionality other than providing database abstraction and sorting the output appropriately. There was only one form that was created, CommentForm, which was attached to each post via django’s comments app. All of the site management was handled via django’s admin application.
The templates were equally simple. It’s just plugging in the data where needed via the use of django’s templates. The images we used for the header of each page were just recreated by eye and a font was chosen that appeared to be really close in appearance to the original. If I recall, some of our gradients in the header images on profile pages is a tad bit darker than MIT’s.
The toughest part was recreating minute details to further the illusion. If you look at the link I posted to the URL configuration above, you will notice that I attempted to recreate the general style of URLs used on MITAdmissions.org. To do RSS feeds, I just created another template and ran it as a generic view.
Will I share the code for the full site? Probably not. However, I’ve basically just described the entire website’s source for you in this comment, so I think that should be sufficient for now.
Also, fun fact: Although several of the bloggers have deleted their accounts and posts entirely from the site, the original guest blogger account still exists. Randall Munroe