Thread

Hi everyone.

I’ve just been asked to pitch on a website for an animal hospital…

The required core functionality of the website would involve users setting up a member profile and registering their pets online, essentially creating a mini profile for each pet. The system would need to send off automatic email reminders notifying the users of things likes vaccination dates, when to change from puppy food to adult food etc… All based around dates specified by the owner and accommodating for multiple pets. Obviously this would all need to be handled without control panel access via an SAEF setup.

I’ve been trying to figure out an EE approach for this. Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions? I’ve been looking at some Solspace modules to do the heavy lifting… User, Calendar and Entry Notifications…

There has also been some talk about a Facebook app integrating within the system.

Just want to bounce ideas off the EE community and how they would approach this.

Thanks in advance

The ideal is to set up an external script that calculates reminder dates based on the appropriate field in EE (ie. field_id_33). It calculates reminders then sends the appropriate emails. You would then set up a cron job that calls that script. You could also call scripts of your desktop windows scheduler but I wouldn’t recommend that. If you had a budget you could hire someone to do this for what I would think is a reasonable amount.

I saw this plugin that allows you to set up cron jobs:
http://expressionengine.com/downloads/details/expressionengine_cron/

Maybe you could loop through each entry looking in your channel and, looking at the date that they need a reminder for - send an email…??

{exp:channel:entries channel="dogs"}

{exp:cron minute="*" hour="*" day="1,15,31" month="*"}
[PUT PHP HERE TO SEND EMAIL]
{/exp:cron}

{/exp:channel:entries}

**this is not a well thought out idea. but maybe soemthing to think about…??