Project Help

Hey all,

I've been planning/nagged to build a site for my dads school in which the parents can log on to check details on their kids (attendance, grades, post sick notes etc). My original thoughts are to have an Access data base containing details on the parents kids etc and then using ASP to run the queries.

I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice on how i should start going about this or any alternatives that you feel might be better than what i've said above.

Any help would be much appreciated,

Cheers :-)

Gather requirements for the site first.
What does it need to do, get details.

going off Memnoch's point, right down what you want the site to do, then story board how you want the site to work and look, this will make building your site much easier.

nice idea, i would not be suprised if alot of schools are doing this in the future but means more work for teachers.

the other question is security, would parents have to login to find out information about there child, asI know I would not want other parents to see my childs info, although you could have an open sections for average school attadance, download lettersyou have lost the kids should have broad hope, holiday time tables etc.

Plus i would use mysql, i personally dont like access, mysql can handle much more info, if you need it that big, and its free. There are draw backs and if you school uses access in theres school it might be better keeping it as that, but its up to you.

Beware make sure you know what the school wants and what they will use, this could turn into a massive project from something small. Story board if the key

Hope that helps sorry if it doesn't, good luck

Thanks thats a big help, i've gone off and bought a sketch pad to do my story board. My plan was to have a login ID for each parent/s. Then this would give them access to the children that they are responsible for.

I like the idea of a public information area which could have info on the school in general.

What sort of login script would yuo suggest? i've been thinking about an authentication from the database but i've also seen ones that just check a simple text file to see if the user is authorised to login.

Thanks again

There are many ways to go about login, and it may be that you could related the information to current computer records that are already setup.

The best way would probably be a simple username and password system, link the unique username to a child ( you cannot use the childs name as a login as there may be 2 children with the same name, or you could set id numbers to children, and give a password to the id number, either way it then depends on how parents will find out the username and password and then how they can change them, will they have to do via the school admin department or can they do it online.

the simplest way would be get them to enter a username and id if its there get the recordesets form the childrens info if not tell them they have made a mistake. There are loads of scripts out there you can get doing a search in google, or its not to hard to buidl your own, there are some good posts on logins on the form you might wannna do a search on here.

Good luck

Again thanks for being so helpful,

I had a thought about the log in i might want, would it be alot more complicated to have a log in history which showed maybe the last 5 log in times/dates? I was hoping that this could allow the parent to see if their child was hacking their account.

Cheers

if you use a simple script first, get that working you can build in the more complex areas one @ a time. always esier to build from something than to work on code that dosn't work @ all.

I think maybe you are new to this, maybe still a student?? So I advise to start small, these things have a habit of growing anyway so don;t worry that it won't be fancy enough.

good luck

sess