Box Office Derby Site

**Objective**: Create a site where users go on a weekly basis and post predictions for movies' weekend grosses. The site keeps tabs on users' weekly prediction accuracy, displaying both weekly accuracy results and lifetime accuracy results. The detailed requirements contain a copious list of implementation details. ## Deliverables **Front-end requirements**: 1. A main page, which lists 10 movies that people can project for the week. From Monday at 12:01 a.m. PDT through Thursday at 11:59 p.m. PDT this page should read "Open for prediction." After that, the movie list should remain constant but the page should read, "Closed while box office returns come in," until Monday at 12:01 a.m. PDT, when the movie list is updated for the upcoming week. 2. A rules page, which contains some static text describing the rules of the contest. You can fill this page in with dummy text and I will edit it myself after you complete the project. 3. A signup page, which allows a user to sign up for an account. 4. A prediction page, which, when a user is logged in, allows the user to enter predictions for the week. Predictions are due by 11:59 p.m. PDT on Thursday. A user should be allowed to edit his predictions prior to 11:59 p.m. PDT on Thursday. 5. A results page, which lists the actual grosses for the most recent week and provides a ranked list of all users for the given week by Weekly Accuracy. This page should always contain the most recent week's list, but also provide links to the list for any past week. 6. A champions page, which lists all users sorted by Lifetime Accuracy. Only users who have appeared in at least N/2 contests (where N is the total number of contest weeks) should be displayed here. Each user's ID should be clickable. When clicked, it should bring up a page with a table containing the user's accuracy by week. Each user-level accuracy figure should also be clickable, and should bring up a page with the user's predictions for the week, the actual grosses, the accuracy by movie and the overall accuracy. 7. A forum with two sub-forums where people can make technical requests or discuss their predictions. Any open-source forum is fine, but user accounts should be shared across the forum and prediction parts of the site. I want user names in the forum to be recognizable in the prediction results. **Back-end requirements**: 1. MySQL tables * user (user ID, user name and account information). This should be updated automatically when a user signs up or edits his account. * movie (movie ID, movie name). This is a table containing all unique movie IDs and names. I will be updating this table by hand. * gross (movie ID, date of Friday, actual gross). This table contains the weekend grosses for every movie and date. I will be updating this table by hand. The weekend gross column is nullable, where the null values correspond to future grosses that are not yet available. Prior to Monday at 12:01 a.m. PDT, I will manually update this table with a list of movies for the upcoming Friday. Prior to Tuesday at 12:01 a.m. PDT, I will manually update this table to fill in the weekend grosses for every movie in the previous week. * prediction (user ID, movie ID, date of Friday, predicted gross). This table holds every user's predictions by movie and date. It should be updated automatically when a user makes or edits a prediction. * I will provide seed commands that initiate the four MySQL tables listed above with dummy data. You are also welcome to add additional tables or views containing Weekly Accuracy and Lifetime Accuracy, but this is not required. 2. Accuracy on an individual movie is defined as ABS(1 - prediction / actual). A user's Weekly Accuracy is defined as the average of his 10 movie accuracies over a given week. A user's Lifetime Accuracy is defined as the average of his Weekly Accuracies over all weeks in which he participated in the contest. **Additional requirements**:** ** I would like the design to look nice and have snazzy-looking widgets, but have no particular requirements with respect to programming language. Any Web framework is welcome. This will be hosted on my dedicated server where I have complete flexibility. The only requirement is that you use MySQL for the back-end database, and that the final product be able to be deployed on my dedicated server running Ubuntu Linux 10.04.** ** **Interview questions:** 1. What is the CMS or Web application framework software you intend to use, or do you plan to write the HTML from scratch? 2. What programming languages or JS libraries will you use? 3. To confirm that you are able to write the MySQL queries that are necessary for the core functionality of the site, please write a MySQL SELECT query using the four tables listed above that returns the accuracy of user ID 123 for the Friday "2012-05-18."