PHP Project idea

roy17

Hi,

I am quite a beginner to PHP. I am currently want to do a project to further my knowledge.
My idea is to create a reminder system.
Something like google calendar which can remind you about your meeting and appointment.
However, i want to make it using a simple interface (user email, time, time zone, what is the reminder).
So, people who visit the site can just type in, and will receive email, one hour, 30 minutes and 10 minutes before the time which the user type in.
I believe PHP have a mail function, but I am still figuring it out.
May I know whether it can be implemented using PHP?

Thanks in advance.

Weedpacket

Most of it is certainly implementable in PHP. The bit that will cause trouble is:

people who visit the site can just type in, and will receive email, one hour, 30 minutes and 10 minutes before the time which the user type in.

Sending messages one hour into the past is difficult. Even ten minutes into the past is tricky.

traq

Weedpacket;11011477 wrote:
Sending messages one hour into the past is difficult. Even ten minutes into the past is tricky.

not really. I get emails (usually spam) up to a week or so in the past on a regular basis. Sometimes, I get emails in the future, too.

roy, keep in mind that most of a project like this is "behind the scenes" work. Google calendar (any calendar) is far more complicated than it looks from the front end. For the reminders, you'll have a lot of DB work to do - [man]mail/man will be the least complicated part of the task.

roy17

you'll have a lot of DB work to do

I don't understand what you mean? How come database is involved in this? Isn't it just passing everything the user input to the mail function?
And by your experience, may I know how long will this kind of project last?

Thanks in advance.

NogDog

Since you do not send the email as soon as the user submits an event, you have to store the info somewhere until it is time to send the email, and that's what databases are made for. This also means you'll need to set up some sort of cron job or other scheduling system to periodically see which events need an email sent, and then actually sending it.

traq

roy17 wrote:
may I know how long will this kind of project last?

somewhere between "a couple hours" to "you'll never finish it." It all depends on your abilities. Since you appear to be very much a beginner, you must have patience, and it will also depend on how well you learn things along the way.

You'll be better off designing how the system will work before trying to code it. You know you'll need a user interface (a calendar and an event form, at a minimum) and functions to prepare and send emails.

You now also know you'll need a database to store the events, and a cron (or some other method) of sending those reminder emails at a particular time.

Is there anything else you'll need? How will all these things interact?

NogDog

This is also an example of an important lesson: there is no such thing as a "simple <insert application type here>". 🙂

sneakyimp

I've considered doing this same thing. You will definitely need a database to store these events as they are entered. Why? Imagine I set a reminder for my wedding anniversary which is 8 months from now. Is the script going to pause for 8 months and then send an email, finally completing next year? Hell no. We are going to store this reminder in a database and have a timer that keeps checking for reminder events and sending out any that are pending.

In order to get this working you'll need a variety of things
1) A form where folks enter reminders. I would advise looking at outlook or gmail calendar or iOS calendar or something for this. It's a bit more complex than you might think. For instance, how many reminders for each event? Do you have to cancel the reminders in order for them to stop? If so, how? What about recurring events?

2) A database to store the reminders. You'll need to think carefully about what database tables you need and what columns each table has.

3) A cron job (a scheduled task on Windows) that checks your database every minute/15 minutes/whatever for events for which a reminder must be sent. You'll need to think through the logic required to check your database and how to identify records that need a reminder sent right now.

4) A mail script (or notifier of some kind) to send out the notifications. You may run into spam blockers or various other issues.

5) What happens when an event passes? Do you clean up your database? If not, this database could grow too large over time.