Ryan's In/Out Board

News

Jan 2008 : Version 2.3 released

Email links now support multiple domains. Simply set $maildomain (in the config file) to your most common domain and enter all others as full e-mail addresses in the datafile.
e.g.
```
$maildomain = "yourdoamin.com";

jsmith|John|OUT||||
jane@otherdomain.org|Jane|OUT||||
```
Fixed bug with JavaScript refresh code.
Prior to version 2.2 if a user changed their status and then refreshed their browser prior to the autorefresh kicking in, their status would be reverted.
To avoid this, some javascript was added to the routine called when a user changes their status. This javascript was being called before the datafile was written and thus - for large numbers of users - the refresh was calling the data from the previous copy of the datafile.
This has been resolved in 2.3 by calling the javascript after the datafiles has been written. If you are using 2.2 it is important that you update ryansiob.pl accordingly or replace it with v2.3 (recommended).

Updating from versions earlier than v2.2 Back to top

If you are updating from v2.1.5 or lower then you will need to be aware of the new departments feature. Users can now be grouped into departments and teams and you can filter the board to show only the one the user chooses.

If you have all your staff/users in a single team then it's probably best to disable the department feature. To do this set the config option $ryansiob::use_dept to be 0 (zero).

If you are going to use departments there are a couple of things you need to change.

Change your datafile to have a number at the end of each row
```
alison|Alison|OUT|04 May / 17:34| - |Tuesday
```
must become
```
alison|Alison|OUT|04 May / 17:34| - |Tuesday|1
```
where the 1 is her department number.
Set the department names in the config file. Edit $ryansiob::dept_names to equal your list, remembering to keep "Every" as the first entry (this is team zero).

In addition to the departments feature the code has been written to be compatible with "use strict;". This means several of the global variables have changed. If you have tweaked your code at all - make sure your changes reflect the new names or you'll get a failed script. See ryansiob.config.pl for details of variable names.

Introduction Back to top

Ryan's In/Out Board is a perl driven in/out board for small-medium size organisations that needs staff to be aware of other staff whereabouts. (It will work for larger organisations but it may be more cumbersome to use with larger numbers of staff).

Displays name,phone,status,comments and date/time for each staff member
Staff are able to quickly change their status by either clicking on their name or calling the main script with a "name" parameter.
Standard comments are provided (Lunch, Leave etc) but can be added to/replaced by any comment the user wishes.
With the aid of a cron job/scheduled task it will also clear all staff as OUT every night, without removing any comments they have entered.
It has a simple and clear interface and users can also search for the status of any staff member.
The generated page can be automatically refreshed at your chosen interval and status colours are defined by you.
It also displays staff internal phone numbers and you can use your own header and footer files.
Staff can be grouped into teams or departments. The resulting In/Out board can then be filtered by users to display just one team/department.

Legal / Licence Back to top

Ryan's In/Out Board is Copyright (c) Ryan P. Cartwright 2001/2007 and is released under the terms of the "GNU General Public License".

Ryan's In/Out Board is provided "as is" and without any express or implied warranties, including, without limitation, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.

Requirements Back to top

Ryan's In/Out Board (RyansIOB) uses a simple text file as a database and thus requires nothing beyond the latest PERL and a web server capable of serving PERL cgi scripts. You will need:-

A web server (i.e. Apache, IIS)
Perl (5 or above)
The Date::EzDate module for Perl

Note to UK Users : If you use the CPAN shell to install Date-EzDate it may fail on the tests. There is an issue with Date-EzDate and 29 Feb 2004 if the timezone is GMT. This causes the Date-EzDate tests to fail but does not impeach on any other functionality of the module. Thus You can still install it manually - by-passing the tests - and it works fine ( I doubt anyone will be using Ryan's In/Out Board to check before 29 Feb 2004).

I have notified the author of Date-EzDate of this issue with the tests and he is working on it for the next version. To my knowledge this only affects GMT users.

Like its sister application Ryan's Electronic Diary Sheet, Ryan's In/Out Board was written to fulfill a need at my employer Contact a Family but I have attempted to make it useable by other organisations.

Ryan's In/Out Board has been tested on Apache 1.3 and 2.0 running SuSE Linux (7.0 and above), Debian (Sarge and Etch). It has also been tested on Apache on Windows XP and 98, IIS on Windows XP and 2003, all running Active State's Activeperl.

I've also had a report of it running fine on a Mac OS-X servers and I see no reason why it won't work under other Unix like OS's.

Download Back to top

The latest version of Ryan's In/Out Board is available via the sourceforge pages. That link will give you a list of all the available releases and also the sample header file.

Everything you need is included in the download follow the intructions in the readme to install and configure.

Readme Back to top

You can read the distributed ryansiobdoc.txt readme file at Sourceforge. Alternatively it's available in ODF and PDF.

Changes Back to top

This is a summary of the changes made at each release of Ryan's In/Out Board

v2.3 - Jan 2008: E-mail links now supports multiple domains. Fixed bug with Javascript refresh section if user status is changed.
v2.2 - May 2007: Departments added. Sorting by fields added. Code tidied - now "use strict".
v2.1.5 - Aug 2006: Minor Update - the distributed allout.pl script had corrupted characters at the end - fixed now.
v2.1.4 - Jul 2006: Minor Update - config script bugfix - autorefresh meta tag was not always being printed
v2.1.3 - Jun 2006: Minor update - search script bugfix - all entries returned in place of results.
v2.1.2 - Mar 2006: Minor update - main script prints datafile read/write errors to web browser. Http headers tidied up. datafile entries now sorted alphabetically in the script
v2.1.1 - Nov 2005: Minor update - couple of typo's fixed.
v2.1 - Nov 2005: HTML config added, HTML cleaned up, Windows instructions enhanced.
v2.0-5a - Nov 2004: no change to actual scripts - just amended the requirements section in README document.
v2.0-5 - Oct 2004: ryansiob.search.pl bug fix - failed to return any web content if it failed to find a match.
v2.0-4 - Oct 2004: ryansiob.search.pl rewritten to tidy code and fix bugs.
v2.0-3 - Oct 2004: Files in archive were inadvertenly stored in DOS format, now in UNIX format
Minor bug fix for use of variable in void context
Envelope.gif now included in archive
v2.0-2 - Sep 2004: Minor bug fix - returns not being displayed
v2.0-1 - Sep 2004: Minor fixes to date function
v2.0 - Sep 2004: Renamed "Ryan's In/Out Board" from Whosin (legal reasons).
Added mail links facility
Amended selection box to automatically select current user
Added Estimated Return date field
Added Date format option
Added Client timezone option
v1.0 - Apr 2003: Full release version
v0.3 - Aug 2002: HTML output tidied up - showing header is now optional
v0.2 - Jul 2002: Initial release version
v0.1 - Jun 2002: Internal test version for Contact a Family

Support Back to top

Sourceforge forums: There is a growing community of Ryan's In/Out Board users - not huge but it's there. To take part in this and get support from everyone involved please use the forum provided via Sourceforge. This also has some FAQ's and there's also a post in the open discussion forum for feature requests and future direction of Ryan's In/Out Board.
Windows & IIS: Please note that - although Ryan's In/Out Board will run fine on Windows servers and IIS. I do not use Windows or IIS and thus my support for that will be limited to any issue directly within Ryan's In/Out Board and not with Windows or IIS. Asking the forum for help may yield some success as there are a good few Windows/IIS users of Ryan's In/Out Board.out there.