Notes for plat/al, a platform for alumni services

PRESENTATION
------------

plat/al is the platform used by Polytechnique.org [1], the alumni site of
Ecole Polytechnique [2], France. This package is a suite of web applications
geared towards alumni websites. This is used to deliver services to more than
12.000 registered alumni on Polytechnique.org.

More information can be found on the plat/al project page [3].

[1] Polytechnique.org     http://www.polytechnique.org/
[2] Ecole Polytechnique   http://www.polytechnique.edu/
[3] plat/al project       http://opensource.polytechnique.org/platal/


REQUIREMENTS
------------

First of all you will need a webserver. If you do not currently have a
webserver, you might consider taking a look at the Apache webserver :

  http://httpd.apache/org/

plat/al is written in PHP so you need PHP support for your webserver. You
can find PHP here :

  http://www.php.net/

plat/al makes use of the Smarty template engine which can be found here :

  http://smarty.php.net/

plat/al also makes heavy use of the Diogenes library, libdiogenes which lives
here :

  http://opensource.polytechnique.org/libdiogenes/

You will need to have access to a MySQL server. If you do not currently have a
MySQL server running, you can download it here :

  http://www.mysql.com/


BUILDING
--------

To build plat/al, simply run "make" from the toplevel directory.