I Was Here – PHP Student Attendance Management System

I Was Here is a simple, free, and open-source PHP Student Attendance Management System. Not the best in the world, but it will help small schools to get started quickly without all the hassle.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Download & Notes	How To Use	Quick Reference
How To Develop	Common Problems

 

 

 

REQUIREMENTS

• Apache Mod Rewrite
• PHP PDO Extension
• Best to have at least PHP 7.4
• “Grade A” browser

I-Was-Here has not been extensively tested, but it is developed and works on a WAMP8 (Windows Apache MySQL PHP 8) server.

 

INSTALLATION

Just access your website and walk through the installer.

 

LICENSE & DOWNLOAD

I-Was-Here is released under the MIT License. You are free to use it for your own personal and commercial projects, modify it as you see fit. On the condition that there the software is provided “as-is”. There are no warranties provided and “no strings attached”. Code Boxx and the authors are not liable for any claims, damages, or liabilities.

Download I-Was-Here | GitHub | SourceForge

 

 

 

STEP 1) REGISTER TEACHERS & STUDENTS

1A) ONE-BY-ONE

Access the “Users” tab. Simply click on the “Add” button to create a new user.

 

1B) IMPORT CSV

Of course, it will be a pain to do that for hundreds of teachers and students, so use the import feature to quickly add/update users. Just create a CSV file with 4 columns – Name, email, role, password. The role must be Admin, Teacher, Student, or Inactive.

 

STEP 2) REGISTER COURSES

Next, register your available courses under the “Courses” tab.

 

 

STEP 3) ASSIGN STUDENTS TO COURSES

3A) ONE-BY-ONE

With that, we can now assign teachers and students to their respective courses. The painful way is to assign the users one by one with their email.

 

3B) IMPORT CSV

The smarter way is to create a single-column CSV file with the email and import it.

 

STEP 4) REGISTER CLASSES

Now that all the necessary data is in, register the classes.

 

STEP 5) TAKE ATTENDANCE

Lastly, teachers only need to log in and select the appropriate class in the portal – Take the attendance.

 

 

 

FOLDER STRUCTURE

• api/ The API endpoint.
• assets/ Public images, Javascript, CSS, etc…
• lib/ Core engine and library files.
• pages/ HTML pages.

Yes, there are only 4 folders in the entire system.

 

DATABASE TABLES

Field	Description
user_id	The user ID, primary key, auto-increment.
user_name	Name of the user.
user_email	Email of the user, unique and does not allow duplicates.
user_role	Admin, Teacher, Student, Inactive.
user_password	Account password.

Field	Description
course_id	Cours ID, primary key and auto-increment.
course_code	The course code, unique.
course_name	Name of the course.
course_desc	A short description of the course.
course_start	Course start date.
course_end	Course end date.

Field	Description
course_id	The course id, primary key.
user_id	The user ID, primary key.

Field	Description
class_id	The class ID, primary key, auto-increment.
user_id	User ID, teacher-in-charge.
couse_id	Course ID.
class_date	Date and time of the class.
class_desc	Short description of the class.

Field	Description
class_id	The class ID, primary key.
user_id	The user ID, primary key.
couse_id	Course ID.
sign_date	Timestamp, when the attendance is taken.

 

 

THE FRAMEWORKS

I Was Here is built with Bootstrap and Core Boxx. Believe it or not, the initial version is built within 48 man-hours using:

• Core Boxx Users Module
• Modified Core Boxx Pretty URL Module

Go ahead and check those out if you want… The other “pre-developed” modules of Core Boxx should also snap right in.

 

 

STEP 1) CREATE/MODIFY DATABASE TABLES

Add your new tables or views, modify the existing ones.

 

STEP 2) ADD/UPDATE SYSTEM MODULE

class Report extends Core {
  function getStudentAttend ($id) {
    return $this->DB->fetchAll(
      "SELECT * FROM `attendence` WHERE `user_id`=? ORDER BY `sign_date` DESC",
      [$id]
    );
  }
}

To add a new module, create lib/LIB-Module.php. Define class Module extends Core, and add functions inside. In this example, we add a new report module – lib/LIB-Report.php and class Report extends Core.

That’s all. This new module can now be loaded via $_CORE->load("Report") and the function can be accessed via $_CORE->Report->getStudentAttend().

 

STEP 3) ADD/UPDATE API ENDPOINT (OPTIONAL)

// (A) MUST BE SIGNED IN
if ($_USER===false || ($_USER["user_role"]!="A" && $_USER["user_role"]!="T")) {
  $_CORE->respond("E", "No permission or session expired", null, null, 403);
}

switch ($_REQ) {
  // (B) INVALID REQUEST
  default:
    $_CORE->respond(0, "Invalid request", null, null, 400);
    break;
 
  // (B) GET STUDENT ATTENDANCE
  case "getStudentAttend":
    $_CORE->autoAPI("Reports", "getStudentAttend");
    break;
}}

Create api/API-Module.php. For this example, send $_POST["id"]=123 to http://site.com/Report/getStudentAttend/ to get the student report – The API will reply with a JSON encoded string.

 

STEP 4) ADD/UPDATE HTML CSS JAVASCRIPT

• Add your new pages in pages/.
  • For admin pages, add pages/APAGE-name.php.
  • For teacher pages, add pages/TPAGE-name.php.
  • For student pages, add pages/SPAGE-name.php.
  • For example, pages/APAGE-report.php can only be accessed by administrators from http://site.com/report.

That’s about it. Just reverse engineer and copy from the existing libraries, API, and pages… You will see the development pattern here.

 

 

I FORGOT THE PASSWORD OR DELETED ALL ADMIN ACCOUNTS

require "lib/GO.php";
$_CORE->load("Users");
$_CORE->Users->save("NAME", "EMAIL", "A", "PASSWORD", OPTIONAL-USER-ID);

Just create an “account recovery” script to create a new account (or update an existing one). Run and delete this afterward.

 

MIGRATED TO A NEW DOMAIN

• Simply update URL_BASE in lib/GO.php.
• Update the path in /.htaccess and /api/.htaccess if necessary.
• Clear the browser cache to prevent irritating cache redirects.

 

MANUAL INSTALLATION

• Create a database and import lib/i-was-here.sql.
• Rename lib/GO.foo to lib/GO.php.
• Open lib/GO.php, update the settings to your own.
  • (A2) The host settings.
  • (A3) Database settings.
  • (A4) If you want to develop mobile apps, consider enabling CORS.
  • (A6) Generate your own secret key, set the issuer to your domain or company name.
• You will need to manually create /.htaccess and /api/.htaccess. Open index.php – Check out (D7) and (D8).
• Delete the installer script index.php… Or just move it somewhere else.
• Rename index.foo to index.php.
• Create your own admin user, see “forgot password” above.

 

NOT WORKING. DON’T KNOW WHY.

Open the developer’s console, reload the page and see the error message.

How To Debug Javascript – A Very Simple Guide

How to Debug PHP Code – A Very Simple Guide