Project - Website for Hamels Foundation

Background: Beginning in 2008, The Hamels Foundation has been dedicated to bringing an end to extreme poverty and hardship endured by lack of educational support.

Co-founded by Cole and Heidi Hamels, The Hamels Foundation has a dual mission to provide support for quality education in the United States and establish a school in Malawi, Africa. The Hamels Foundation is dedicated to enriching the lives of children and giving them the tools to achieve their goals.

The Hamels Foundation takes a community-based approach to education by providing assistance to inner-city schools in the United States, including but not limited to, providing stimulating learning environments, high-quality educational programs, and necessary provisions to promote learning.

The Hamels Foundation's commitment extends globally to Malawi, Africa, where they will begin building a boarding school for girls in July, 2009. Malawi is one of the poorest, most impoverished nations in the world with an overwhelming HIV and AIDS epidemic. The Hamels Foundation's school will offer critical intervention to young women and girls in Malawi. Through female empowerment, education and AIDS awareness programs, The Hamels Foundation aims to break the cycle of disease and poverty and improve the futures of its students.

Option Matrix built the website of Hamels Foundation from ground up and provide a content management system with all requisite features.

In this document we have provided the feature list and technology architecture overview for this project.

Technology Architecture
PHP 5 with MYSQL 5 on Linux server is proposed as the technology stack for this application. Cross browser compatibility across Safari, IE 6 / 7 and Firefox 2/ 3 is adequate.

Application will be optimized for Internet Explorer 6+ but HTML 4 compliance will be preserved to ensure cross browser compatibility with other common browsers like Safari and Firefox.

Cross browser compatibility is largely ensured through use of XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4 compliance. All application testing will be done in Firefox which has a more restrictive implementation of HTML / JavaScript and this ensures that it runs well in IE browsers too. Any cross browser issues will be debugged if they arise during module testing. Optimistic locking will be used in database operations to improve concurrent user performance. Extensive use of stored procedures will ease network traffic and database performance.

PEAR coding standards will be used throughout the application.