[PLUG] Multiple Administrators for a Web Site Feature

[Heath Morrison]

Hello,

Well, here's an idea that is a bit less inventive but may be a better
fit for your organization.

You might consider using one of these services, such as
http://www.flashalert.net/ or http://www.cancellations.com/, which are
in the business of alerting people when weather mucks things up. I
couldn't find anything useful on FlashAlert's site, but
cancellations.com is free for business owners. I've used
cancellations.com in the past, when my girlfriend was a teacher in
another state. You would setup the service for your business, and then
instruct your personnel on how to use it. It's all pretty simple. It
also allows people to signup to email and SMS alerts, if they so
choose.

Then, on your website, you can simple insert an iframe with the
cancellations.com page for your organization inside of it. Or, to
maintain consistency on your site, create a simple PHP page that
slurps up the contents of cancellations.com's page and pretties it up.
Using PHP and curl would also allow you to do some sanity checks on
the content before displaying it to your users.

It's a lot less home-brew than the other suggestions, but I think you
might find it meets your needs with significantly less work than
setting up WebDAV, etc.

-Heath

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 7:46 AM, Richard C. Steffens <rsteff at comcast.net> wrote:
> What technique can I use to allow someone to "log in" to a place on a
> web site that can make a change to a <div> on the site's home page? The
> <div> needs to be turned on and off, and a situation dependent message
> needs to be added.
>
> As a member of a committee, I take care of a web site for our
> organization. Others on the committee help me come up with ideas and I
> get to code them. Our committee was given the task of coming up with a
> way to alert folks to weather related cancellations of meetings. There
> is a "phone tree" to call members, but no way to reach non-member,
> regular attendees. I can easily add a <div> to the site's home page with
> cancellation info, but I need a way to let others on the committee post
> the same info when, like over Christmas week, I had no Internet connection.
>
> I thought about just teaching each of them how to use a simple text
> editor to create the text of the cancellation message, and upload it to
> the site with ftp, but then I realized that I'd have to make sure each
> of them has an ftp client, and I don't know what's available for Mac's.
> Plus, it's a bit complicated (for them) to actually find the right place
> to put the file.
>
> The site is hosted at SpiritOne, and has MySQL and php available. I use
> php for the site so I can take advantage of the concept of include
> files. I haven't used MySQL, yet, but I suppose that's a possibility,
> although it seems like using a sledge hammer to drive a carpet tack.
>
> TIA.
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Dick Steffens
> www.dicksteffens.com
>
>
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