Design and Implementation of a Web Based E-Archive System
Abstract
This study presents the design and implementation of a web based E-Archive System intended to organize, review, publish, and retrieve student research outputs within an academic institution. The project addressed fragmented storage, inconsistent review workflows, and limited access to completed research documents by providing separate interfaces for students, faculty members, administrators, and public readers. A developmental research approach was used. The existing PHP and MySQL application was examined through source-code inventory, database-schema review, workflow tracing, interface revision, and PHP 5.6 compatibility testing. The resulting system supports account registration and approval, group assignment, research proposal submission, chapter-level document management, faculty announcements and comments, administrative approval and publication, public search, and configurable branding. The reviewed codebase contains 80 application PHP files outside bundled editor samples and 15 tables in the supplied database schema. Syntax verification confirmed that the revised application files parse under PHP 5.6.32. The interface was also consolidated around administrator-controlled title, logo, primary, banner, and text colors so public, student, faculty, and administrator pages share a consistent identity. Technical inspection nevertheless identified limitations in legacy request handling, unrestricted research-document uploads, hard-coded local URLs, and incomplete database constraints. Because the available evidence consisted of source files and a schema rather than participant data, findings are limited to implemented functionality, code-level observations, and repeatable compatibility checks; they do not represent measured user satisfaction. The study concludes that the system establishes a workable role-based research archive and workflow foundation, but production deployment requires systematic security hardening, controlled file preservation, database migration, backup, and formal usability evaluation.