Organizing lunch for a group of people in multiple offices across campus is annoying. We have instant messages, we have email, we have a chatroom, we have phones, but nobody wants the sole responsibility of coordinating where we eat for lunch. Sometimes it's beautiful outside and we want to go out there -- but some people don't.
So I built this tool to do it for us. This system is simply a voting system. We always eat lunch at noon. Voting opens at 9am every day. Everyone gets a reminder via email at 11am to vote, if they haven't already. At 11:45am it sends out another email to everyone with the result of the vote. That's it!
It sounds simple, but it's amazingly effective. Voting is anonymous, so nobody can blame anyone for the end result. The page even tries to use the World Weather Online API to help figure out whether it's even a good idea to eat outside. (You will need to get an API key from them to use it.)
There's basic commenting functionality, as well as the ability to show off where you're gonna go get something to eat.
See the CHANGELOG.md file for info on updates.
I coded this for my coworkers at Emerson College, so it has a lot of Emerson-isms about it.
The email it generates to remind people to vote is from "Cylebot", which is what I put at the end of all of my automated emails. You might want to change that, but whatever.
Also, when it emails people in "reminder.php" and "result.php", it uses the person's username and appends it with "@whatever.com" -- because at Emerson everyone has an @emerson.edu address. You might want to change that by adding a database field for "email" or something.
We only had three options in our case:
- Eat outside.
- Eat inside.
- I don't care / I won't be there.
Also, most importantly, this system requires a login system, referenced as "login_check.php", but is not included here because the one used is proprietary to Emerson. Any reference to the $current_user variable will throw an error if you just roll this out as-is. The $current_user array simply contains values for "loggedin" (boolean), "username" (string), and "user_id" (int).
- A linux-based web server, Apache or lighttpd or whatever
- Ability to send mail from the server
- PHP 5.3+
- MySQL 5.0+
- The "Mail" PHP PEAR package -- you can use the built-in mail() function but it'll require refactoring
Put it anywhere, really. Run the included SQL file to set up the database tables.
In index.php, set the $here_zipcode and $weather_api_key variables, too.
You should populate the destinations table in the database with some local eateries.
There are two cron jobs which send the two emails, so you'll need to set those up on your server. One runs at 11:00am to run "reminder.php" and the other runs at 11:45am to run "result.php".
Finally, you need to go into the database and actually add the options for voting on. I didn't create any admin interface for this.