mssever / student-records

A webapp to manage student records. WARNING: This should be regarded as a demo only, as it is missing important features needed for production use.

About

Student Records is a simple class records app. I created it out of dissatisfaction with my school's paper-based records system, where the papers were a poor reflection of reality. It grew to provide an interface for all the classroom-management stuff I needed.

I wrote it in PHP and CodeIgniter because I needed to get it written quickly and writing a webapp seemed to be the fastest way considering my prior experience. And I really like the CodeIgniter framework, because the learning curve is much lower than any other competing framework I've evaluated.

Caveats

Because I wrote Student Records for my own use on my own (single) laptop, there are a few features common to most webapps that this one doesn't have. First, there is no support for multiple users. Second, there is no access control. I've deemed that my laptop's security (lock screen password, login password, disk encryption, etc.) is adequate for my situation.

Because I wrote it exclusively for my own use, it isn't documented well and is doubtless full of usability issues. Also, I didn't bother with validation beyond what is available directly in HTML 5.

The feature set is narrowly limited to a very specific situation. I'm distributing this app as a part of my protfolio. I don't expect it to be useful to anyone else in its current state in terms of actual use.

I've only tested Student Records in Chromium running under Linux. I think it will work on any modern browser and OS, but I can't say for sure.

Installation

Dependencies

On your local machine, you need to already have Apache 2 with mod_rewrite, PHP 5, and MySQL 5 properly installed and configured. I recommend that you configure Apache to use virtual hosts and use /etc/hosts (or your own local DNS server) to create virtual hostnames, so that you can access your websites at URLs like "http://sr.mss/" or whatever you choose to call them.

For security reasons, I recommend that Apache be configured to only accept connections from localhost.

Installation Steps

1. Unpack the tar file into an appropriate document root. The source root directory should be the document root, such that it can be accessed from a browser with the bare hostname (e.g., "http://sr.mss/"). Some parts of the app assume that they can access a URL such as "/js/something.js" and have it work.

2. Create a database for Student Records to use. It assumes that it owns the entire database. If you want to make it share a database, it's up to you to make sure that no conflicts arise.

3. Using the MySQL management tool of your choice, import sr_backup.sql into MySQL. This file will create the schema and load sample data.

4. Edit the following configuration files:

   A. application/config/config.php: Set $config['base_url'] to the URL you intend to use to access the app. I use "http://sr.mss/" here.

   B. application/config/database.php: Configure your database connection details on the various $db['default'] lines. Note that although CodeIgniter supports multiple databases, the queries in this app were not written with portability in mind and might not work on any database other than MySQL, which is why MySQL is listed as a hard dependency.

5. Verify that Apache is able to use mod_rewrite and .htaccess files.

6. You're done! Open up a browser and point it at the hostname that you configured.