PHP web portal

[CptDondo]

I've been asked about the feasibility of a web portal for some
controllers we are developing.

Basically, the portal would offer accounts to subscribers and allow them
to view and control their equipment.

The view is primarily a spreadsheet with clickable links for each
controller. The link would bring up a detailed view.

I would imagine the backend would be SQL based, with a separate data
collection engine and display engine.

Is anyone aware of a GPL (or similar FOSS) licensed project that can do
this?

Thanks,

--Yan

[Mike P2]

On May 2, 12:07 pm, CptDondo <[e-mail]:

I've been asked about the feasibility of a web portal for some
controllers we are developing.

Basically, the portal would offer accounts to subscribers and allow them
to view and control their equipment.

The view is primarily a spreadsheet with clickable links for each
controller. The link would bring up a detailed view.

I would imagine the backend would be SQL based, with a separate data
collection engine and display engine.

Is anyone aware of a GPL (or similar FOSS) licensed project that can do
this?

Thanks,

--Yan

Controllers? Equipment?

[CptDondo]

Mike P2 wrote:

On May 2, 12:07 pm, CptDondo <[e-mail]:

>I've been asked about the feasibility of a web portal for some
controllers we are developing.

Basically, the portal would offer accounts to subscribers and allow them
to view and control their equipment.

The view is primarily a spreadsheet with clickable links for each
controller. The link would bring up a detailed view.

I would imagine the backend would be SQL based, with a separate data
collection engine and display engine.

Is anyone aware of a GPL (or similar FOSS) licensed project that can do
this?

Thanks,

--Yan

Controllers? Equipment?

Yup.... Basically, we have some "stuff" out there in the wild. Our
customers want to know what their "stuff" is doing. So we're building
web-enabled controllers for the "stuff".

Now, this "stuff" sits out there in some pretty remote places, and some
of our customers have lots of "stuff". They don't want to visit 600
individual web pages to see how all of their "stuff" is doing so they
want a single website to show them that.

We're looking for something that can a) poll the "stuff" on a regular
basis, and put the results into a database, and b) display the data in
the database on a website in some sort of logical manner, as in a
spreadsheet.

I would guess that we would need to write most of the data collection
backend, but the frontends should be around; something with sessions,
access control since we don't want customer A to mess with B's "stuff",
a decent UI, and so on.

Does that explain it a little better? (Sorry if it was too vague....)

--Yan

[Mike P2]

CptDondo wrote:

Yup.... Basically, we have some "stuff" out there in the wild. Our
customers want to know what their "stuff" is doing. So we're building
web-enabled controllers for the "stuff".

Now, this "stuff" sits out there in some pretty remote places, and some
of our customers have lots of "stuff". They don't want to visit 600
individual web pages to see how all of their "stuff" is doing so they
want a single website to show them that.

We're looking for something that can a) poll the "stuff" on a regular
basis, and put the results into a database, and b) display the data in
the database on a website in some sort of logical manner, as in a
spreadsheet.

I would guess that we would need to write most of the data collection
backend, but the frontends should be around; something with sessions,
access control since we don't want customer A to mess with B's "stuff",
a decent UI, and so on.

Does that explain it a little better? (Sorry if it was too vague....)

--Yan

A cron and a short script are probably all you need for updating this
top-secret "stuff". PEAR probably has something for displaying data
from a database table in an HTML table (as an ASP.net control might do
by default), but I don't think you're going to find anything specific
enough to just get your data like that and let customers log in to see
it. You might use a CMS like Drupal for sessions and authentication
and stuff like that, and then you would just need to alter it to fit
your project and add the functionality (I don't think this should be a
lot of work at all) to display that user's "stuff" data.

Honestly, to me it doesn't seem all that complicated (maybe it would
be more complicated if the project were described more), I would
suggest having one person code the whole thing. It could be done with
one script for the cron job, and another for login/view stuff & links/
some other functionality, although the latter should probably be split
up into two pages (or more if this really is more complicated than you
described). I think it could be done in a day or two if you could find
someone with nothing else to do.

-Mike PII

[CptDondo]

Mike P2 wrote:

A cron and a short script are probably all you need for updating this
top-secret "stuff". PEAR probably has something for displaying data
from a database table in an HTML table (as an ASP.net control might do
by default), but I don't think you're going to find anything specific
enough to just get your data like that and let customers log in to see
it. You might use a CMS like Drupal for sessions and authentication
and stuff like that, and then you would just need to alter it to fit
your project and add the functionality (I don't think this should be a
lot of work at all) to display that user's "stuff" data.

I kind of figured that the backend would have to be written from
scratch; it is fairly simple but there are some complications mostly due
to low bandwidth and expensive connections.

I'll check on CMS; it didn't even occur to me that that's what we're
really after... (Waaaay too stupid after staring at the same 80 lines
of code all morning....)

>
Honestly, to me it doesn't seem all that complicated (maybe it would
be more complicated if the project were described more), I would
suggest having one person code the whole thing. It could be done with
one script for the cron job, and another for login/view stuff & links/
some other functionality, although the latter should probably be split
up into two pages (or more if this really is more complicated than you
described). I think it could be done in a day or two if you could find
someone with nothing else to do.

It is fairly simple, except for the security/user management/etc stuff.

I was hoping to find a frontend with the eye candy UI that we like. :-)

--Yan