Kiosks - news flashes and advertising posters

I had coded the kiosk interface as a dynamic webpage: using Bootstrap to handle the formatting, and PHP to gather up the data from outside systems (the API of PC availability; the study rooms; the occupancy total).

While doing so, I hadn't put any thought into the possibility that anyone apart from me would ever want to make changes to the content.  As such, the backend setup was very programmatic, and editable only on a web server to which few of our staff have access.

I had basically created a setup that would leave me hostage to making each and every change!

That would have been fine if we were talking about interesting developments to the floorplans, or additional API calls: but, very quickly, colleagues were asking me to post latest-news style articles at short notice.

To allow me to retain control of  the code, while letting colleagues update the page, I came up with a simple trick of a web form that allowed colleagues to enter a headline and the text of a news flash.  Whatever they typed into the form was saved to a MySQL database, from which it was inserted live into the kiosk main page - with all the appropriate formatting applied.

This proved such a quick win (in sparing me from spade work) that I adapted the web-form->MySQL method to allow colleagues to add a digital poster to the display.  This permitted our Admin team to advertise topical events and news, without needing me, and leaving the code of the page safe from accidental change.

In the picture, you can see a poster advertising some events from our Digital Discovery week.  The news flash has been temporarily removed to make space for a scrolling carousel of book jackets that link through to our catalogue during Black History Month.