State management, configuration and installation of web application

Version A

Internet notice board with user profiles

• Investor requirements:
• "The notice board participants have to register, giving their first and second name, e-mail address, location (town + country), date of birth and gender. They use a login and password for the board access."
• "Each user has a possibility of editing his/her profile. The user can also add his picture (avatar) to the profile (but it's not obligatory)."
• "The users can leave their messages on the notice board. Each message is put in some thread, the users can add new threads."
• "If the user uses the notice board on one workstation, he does not need to give the login details each time he accesses the page. However, the user must have a possibility of disabling such option as well."
• "Each of the messages left on the board should contain, besides the message body, the date and time when it has been posted, the name of the user who created it, his location, age, and, if exists, his picture. The user name should link to the user's profile, and, in case of currently logged user, to the 'edit profile' page."
• "On the main page, or on the page containing the list of topics, a list of currently logged users should be available"
• "Each user should fall into a particular user-category (e.g. guest, junior member, senior member, ...), depending on how often he/she logs into the board (logins per day starting from the day of registration or gathered from some period of time)"
• "After the session expires, the user should be redirected to the login page, independently on which page is currently opened. In case the session expires while writing a new message, the message should not be lost after logging in again."
• System administrator remarks:
• "User data should be stored in an XML file in the data subdirectory."
• "The way of storing the messages is not specified. However these should be stored in the messages subdirectory"
• "User picture has to be copied on the server, and stored in the avatars subdirectory. The image size should be limited to 50 kB."
• "Number of user logins should be obtained by counting the number of sessions started by the user. Session expire time should be set to 5 minutes."
• Marking remarks:
• The entire project should be published over the Internet - provide the URL with the solution.
• The project should be user-friendly - avoid situations in which the user finds himself lost.
• Writing code, which is already implemented in .NET can result in lower marks.
• The investor is always right, independently on how precisely does he utter his ideas.