How to display on/off status on a website?

March 31, 2006 12:18 PM

How can I set up a simple system that allows a non-html knowing website owner to change easily change the displayed status of team members on the site?

The business has 17 team members, each one with their own page on the website. The business owner needs to easily change each member's status from "Available" to "Unavailable" using text or an graphic icon. I tried to make this work with multiple ICQ accounts and a couple different programs that allow simultaneous access but it was far from flawless.

Could this work with submitted form? I don't want to install a bulky content management system just for this small function.

posted by davebush to computers & internet (7 comments total)

You could write this pretty easily in PHP or some such language. It sounds like a rather customized need, so I'm not so sure you're going to be able to find a canned script to do this. It wouldn't be too hard with a scripting language, though. Do you do any programming?
posted by twiggy at 12:45 PM on March 31, 2006

I second twiggy's comments.

Very simple to do in a scripting language (even javascript if no backend pre-processor is available on the host and javascript is not an issue) but I can't think of a single way to change state on a web page without some interaction (pre-processor or ftp/telnet access). The ICQ idea is clever but invevitably unworkable and too dependent on outside variables.
posted by m@ at 1:07 PM on March 31, 2006

Yeah, a PHP script plus a single table MySQL database would do this. If you have any programming experience you should be able to knock this together in a couple of days, with a basic cookie to authenticate the boss.
posted by cillit bang at 1:26 PM on March 31, 2006

You could even do it with PHP (or similar) writing to a flat file (list of team members followed by a 1 or 0 to signify available or unavailable) and then you wouldn't need the MySQL. You could have a separate file-management page that opened the file into a form and then rewrote the file from the form when you clicked submit.

Do you know any geeks who owe you favours?
posted by Grangousier at 2:02 PM on March 31, 2006

Here's a simple PPHP script that will do it. Might not be the most efficient code, but I threw it together without much thought. The source is here.
posted by rafter at 2:55 PM on March 31, 2006

This sounds like the world's simplest content-management system.

I'd write a page with a form, and a radio button next to each player's name. Saving the form would change the pages. And I'd go for the "security through obscurity" authentication model, i.e. none.

On preview ... which is exactly what rafter has done. Only I would have done it in Perl. Just because.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 3:02 PM on March 31, 2006

rafter - That's pretty damn sweet. Thanks tons.
posted by davebush at 9:23 PM on March 31, 2006