Teachers want to post daily homework assignments.

Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy.
This forum is not for asking programming related questions.

Moderator: General Moderators

Post Reply
chucker
Forum Newbie
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu May 26, 2005 9:32 pm

Teachers want to post daily homework assignments.

Post by chucker »

I'm looking for a php script, perhaps the simplest of bulletin boards, that would allow teachers to easily start up a bulletin board and post each days homework assignments. The newest assignment would always be on top, and old assignments would disappear after 30 days. My php knowledge is limited. There is no need for follow-up posts by viewers. I looked and MINIBB but even that looked like a lot of work to set up.
Any help would be appreciated except by the students who will lose one excuse for not doing their homework.
User avatar
John Cartwright
Site Admin
Posts: 11470
Joined: Tue Dec 23, 2003 2:10 am
Location: Toronto
Contact:

Post by John Cartwright »

All of which is supported by phpbb.com (our current forums of choice).
Most likely your hosting has cpanel which I believe SHOULD have a phpbb installer. Either way, extremely easy to install. Just read the documentation.
User avatar
Burrito
Spockulator
Posts: 4715
Joined: Wed Feb 04, 2004 8:15 pm
Location: Eden, Utah

Post by Burrito »

writing your own would be a piece of cake too. If all they need to do is post an assignment and don't necessarily need any feedback, then you would probably whip that out in a day (I base that on someone with NO PHP or MySQL knowledge).

would be a good learning excercise if nothing else...

we're always here to help, so if that's the direction you decide to take come back and visit :D
chucker
Forum Newbie
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu May 26, 2005 9:32 pm

Homework Assignment

Post by chucker »

I realized I have phpBB on another website I maintain (I am a volunteer for a several non-profits) and played with it a bit last night. There are a ton of features and with them, a lot of wasted space on the screen which would have to be cleaned out.

Because there could be 50 teachers, each with four classes, I was thinking Groups=Departments, Forums=Teachers, Topics=Courses, Posts=Daily Homework. What I need is a page with all 50 teachers linked. Those links need to be pretty small so I would have to radically change the user list. You folks probably know this inside and out. Is this hard to do?

Also, is there a way to create the database through ftp or with a script? I don't have backend access to this server and the host tried to create one but when I run install.php I keep getting:phpBB : Critical Error

Could not connect to the database
User avatar
Burrito
Spockulator
Posts: 4715
Joined: Wed Feb 04, 2004 8:15 pm
Location: Eden, Utah

Re: Homework Assignment

Post by Burrito »

chucker wrote: Because there could be 50 teachers, each with four classes, I was thinking Groups=Departments, Forums=Teachers, Topics=Courses, Posts=Daily Homework. What I need is a page with all 50 teachers linked. Those links need to be pretty small so I would have to radically change the user list. You folks probably know this inside and out. Is this hard to do?
I'm not sure what that means but with MySQL you can easily create relationships between whatever you want and then using PHP as a front end, you can display results from the database in a plethora of different fashions.

to address your error issue, PHP and MySQL are entirely independent of each other. In order for them to talk to each other, you need to configure PHP to know about MySQL (through the php.ini file). If this is a hosted site, they should have that taken care of for you. My suggestion would be to call them and explain the problem you experienced to them and have them help you. If this is a server you're setting up on your own, then we can certainly help you with configurations of your php.ini file.

as soon as you start getting into the nitty and more importantly the gritty of your project, post your ideas of how you want things structured and we can provide you some potential solutions. Right now the information you provided is still too vague so there's not a whole lot we can do for suggestions.
Post Reply