InstraSchedule
Alison Cooper
This is a Perl CGI reservation website for music instructors and student musicians. They can both reset their passwords, in which case a temp gibberish password is sent to them (instead of their old password, since it's encoded using md5) and they can change it by logging in with that temporary password. Session data is stored using CGI::Cookie. The site is formatted using a CSS sheet. A template was used, but original hidden fields were added to get it to look the way we wanted it to.
Instructor's can make accounts (linked to their email addresses - please use a non-Columbia email address, given problems with sending email through scripts to those accounts). With an account, they get an Upcoming Lessons calendar, which shows two blank calendars - for this month and the next. These calendars are tied to localtime and roll over automatically. The reason, therefore, for two calendars is to enable scheduling lessons in advance (if the current month is April and the instructor wants to schedule a lesson on May 1st, they'd have to wait until May 1st to schedule that lesson; giving next month's calendar fixes this issue). Calendar's generated using the HTML::CalendarMonthSimple module, with extensive regular expression input checking.
An instructor selects the month they want to edit, and then can add their available times to that calendar. They cannot schedule overlapping slots. They also cannot schedule times on days that have already passed, or the current day (i.e. if it is April 16th, they can schedule lessons in April from the 17th onward).
Instructor's can also add a demo video to their account. All they have to do is upload a video to youtube and copy and paste the URL in the browser to the embed field. They can also remove the video. They can only have one video associated with their account.
Instructor's can also remove lesson slots. They can only remove slots that occur from tomorrow onward. If it is a student's lesson, it is replaced with an available slot.
An instructor can also view a PDF of tomorrow's schedule, so that they can know which lessons are immediately coming up.(This makes more sense than today's schedule, given that this tool is intended to be used for planning in (the short-term) advance). The PDF::Create module was used to do this.
Student accounts enable a user to view all available instructors on the system. When they select an instructor, they can view that instructor's upcoming availability. They can only see available slots, unlike instructors, which can view both their available and takens slots. If the instructor being viewed has uploaded a demo video, the student can see the video.
A student can also view their upcoming calendar's (two months for the same reason mentioned above for instructors).
They can add a lesson (only from tomorrow onward). That slot then vanishes from other student's viewing the availability. Students cannot schedule overlapping slots. To cancel a lesson, we decided it was best that the students contact the instructors directly, to ensure communication between the student and teacher (it just make sense, based on the fact that this is a site that deals with interactive business). Instructor's, however, have the capacity to cancel student lessons, given that they have the choice to accept a student's business or not, while in scheduling a lesson the student is the one who initiates the transaction.
There is also a link to view site statistics on the homepage.
Link (sometimes live, depending on Columbia's server):
http://web3157.cs.columbia.edu/~afc2135/cs3157/Perl_Project/All_Files/home.pl.cgi