I have recently been asked to build a site for our county’s inter-agency council. One of the things we would like to do is to set up a system to share resources between the agencies.
For example:
A local homeless shelter just lost all 20+ beds in its men’s dorm because of an outbreak of bedbugs. We would like them to be able to open up a request telling the other agencies that they bed 20 bed frames made of metal (wooden bed frames do not survive the treatment required to remove bed bugs). We would then like to push that ticket out to all of the other agencies as they might have someone willing to donate some number of them.
Similarly we would like to be able to push out situations where an agency has a resource that needs a use. So: maybe the local judge waived a fine in leu of community service, the case manager could open a ticket as a resource stating they had 25 hours of supervised community service they needed used up for their “client”. Push out that request and be able to mark it as assigned to maybe the library.
To give you an idea as to scale, the entire county has less than 30,000 people, the council about 35 non-profit and charitable organization plus county and 4 cities, and the budget for this project is what I (a volun-told volunteer) opt to pay out of my student pocket.
I could probably write a simple php/sql database system for the project, but if someone has a good idea I would rather not re-invent the wheel.
I did notice that a 2017 post ended with the suggestion of freshdesk, but I really need something I can deploy in a limited environment (ahem Dreamhost) and not rely on a 3rd party server if I can avoid it. (the more I describe it the more i think I will just end up writing something simple, but it never hurts to ask.)
Never hurts to ask.
RK Brumbelow
PS I have licenses for Stacks, Rapidcart 4.13, and PlusKit (and a few others) if that jogs anyone’s mind for a possible solution.
Do, access does not need to be restricted, at least not at the outward (publicly/ internet facing) level. It make me curious why you think it is a database application rather than a website. If you mean it is a website with database access or some other storage medium, sure, but many stacks are capable of doing lat or database access. It certainly needs to have an outward facing html rendered user interface, and so I would call it a website or a database driven web app at worst.
I would think that you wouldn’t want just anyone marking that “20 beds aren’t available” or opening a ticket that says “they have 25 hours of community services available”.
Yes it might need to be on a website, but I think it would be in need of some sort of login credentials.
I was thinking more like a FileMaker application, that also allows internet connections.
Actually, we do want anyone to be able to post a need. That being said I was one of the maintainers for Apples PHP implementation and helped develop openEMR, am really not concerned about securing the resource that action is relatively trivial as if it became problematic we could simply require registration and have it auto populate the need location info from the registration. If I wanted to really worry about it at the server level I can geographically redirect assets and create a honeypot. I appreciate the input but I can implement the system in PHP/SQL and not have to worry about filemaker’s overhead (cost and computational power). I am wondering if someone has a stack or combo already doing something similar. I have started contact with the developer of Booking to see if he thinks his stack could be modded to do what I need. Limited time and funds I do not want to reinvent not only the wheel, but the vulcanizing process also.