The context/problem

We (Mike Child, Costas Calcanis and I) are about to embark on creating a new website for the Faculty. It's going to be pretty big, so we really need to have some kind of basic content management system in place. Hence this mini-project.

Initial concept

There's a lot of information about on content management systems (see >>this useful list of links for example), and it seems that they can be very far-reaching. But for starters I want to try to implement a simple automated reminder system along the following lines...

1. Every web page will include an html comment in it like this:
   <!-- Expiry Checker: check,dd/mm/yy,email@ddress -->
    
2. An Expiry Checker program will check the expiry date within all the html files, and whenever it comes across a date that matches today's date it will send a reminder email to email@ddress.
    
3. A unix cron job will activate the Expiry Checker once a day.

Instead of the keyword "check", we could also have other keywords, e.g. "delete", "update" etc. if they warranted different emails to be sent.

A more sophisticated solution?

This (above) is a very primitive solution and I can easily imagine something much more sophisticated. For example, it could be extended along these lines:

• The recipient of the email would be presented with a unique URL for their response. When they click on that URL they would be presented with a page having two options - the first is just an "OK" button, the second is a "Change Request" text entry box so that they can enter instructions to the webmaster as to what needs to be done.
   
• Whatever the recipient's response is, they are then asked when the system should remind them next.
   
• If they've clicked OK, the date field in the Expiry Checker comment in the html file should be updated, and a copy of the updated file should be emailed to the webmaster.
   
• If they've entered a change request this should be emailed to the webmaster, along with the html file with the Expiry Checker date field already updated.
   
• If they haven't responded (i.e. haven't clicked on the URL) they should be sent a reminder email one week later. If they don't then respond within a week of that, an explanatory email should be sent to the webmaster who must then chase this up. (It may be that the member of staff has left the University, for example.)