I have been asked as an IT Technician to assist one of the IT Teachers at a residential school I work at to help with an Intranet site (I have had some experience with basic HTML before so thats why I was asked).

The school is a residential school for up to 16 teenagers with learning difficulties and challenging behaviour (a lot of the students have Autism).

So, where am I needing help? well, everywhere really!! The site needs to be user friendly and have minimal daily maintenance but also be able to be viewed on a large touch screen plasma in our entrance hall. The Intranet site will be showing media files/videos of the students doing all the great things we do etc etc but also once pressed will bring up a menu allowing the students to touch a symbol to gain access to three main areas of the site.

• Todays School Timetable - highlighted by time depending on time of day
• Visitors expected at school today (including their picture)
• List of senior management team on site today

For this to work, I feel it should all be run from a calendar script but have no idea which script would be best to use or in which language etc etc etc

(First impression was a PHP Script with a SQL server)


Anyone able to give me any pointers or able to assist me build the site?

Thanks in advance!

Do you have any experience implementing php/asp.net scripts ? As this could prove difficult if your not too sure what you are doing. There are some 3rd party tools out there which will probably do all this for you but your gonna have to pay for these as i dont know of any free ones.

Are you able to forward some links to me of these 3rd party products - I can then forward them on to my boss

Thanks in advance

well a quick google search for "intranet timetable software" comes up with a few.
Sorry i think i phrased my last entry wrong "There are some 3rd party" i mean that there is more than likely 3rd party apps.
I have never actually used anything as i feel comfortable buidling my own, but im certain these would fullfill what your looking for but may be too complex to customise to have a simple interface.

This is one of them cases where it may require a developer to implement a system catered for you which you or another then could update/tweak and edit.

If you head about doing this your self then the two bullet points you listed

* Visitors expected at school today (including their picture)
* List of senior management team on site today

shouldnt be difficult to implement and is probably easiest to start with.
But you will then need a back end for staff to edit these details.

Perhaps its best for you to attempt a mock up system for one of these elements and see how far you get. The learning curve is huge but if you break it down you should be able to achieve everything you require. And everyone on daniweb would be happy to help with problems you come across. (Just not particularly writing it for you)


I spose this post has mixed you up even more. Sorry about that.

ohmmm, my university uses Blackboard