Creating an advanced admin/staff rota [closed] - php

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I know this place is for uploading code that may need some help although I hope you won't mind helping as I'm not sure where to really start with this code. You are the experts and I am a novice requiring help with future coding. If there is a section aimed at this kind of thing, I will be happy to repost.
Here is the situation:
I am starting work on an advanced admin backend panel for my staff, an idea I currently have is to use a MySQLi database to create the staff rota, to be displayed in a simple calendar like table on the aPanel.
Now, the advanced part is the staff member will be able to click "Clock In" or "Clock Out" during the times/days they are issued on the rota.
The system will NOT let the staff member Clock In, unless they are on the rota for that time of day. I will then have access to a management section of the panel allowing me to view the amount of hours the staff member has been clocked in for for if they have missed days, or are late, etc... And pay them for recorded clocked in hours.
Maybe some added features would be that they are clocked out automatically at the end of their shift or the system would record overtime and such?
I have no idea how I would go about creating such system or if it is actually possible so if anybody may have any advice/tips/examples for such idea I would appreciate any help!
All the best!

Answer 1

Your system will necessarily consist of several parts:
Database Store - Houses all necessary information for the system, Staff Schedules, Timeclock Entries, User Information, etc. Sounds like you already have this mostly in place, though it may need some tweaking for your purposes.
Staff Assignment / Admin Interface - System to allow administrators or those with appropriate access to assign schedules to Staff, add new Staff to the system, etc.
Timeclock Frontend - Staff would use this to login to view their schedules, and clock in/out.
(Possibly) Automated Monitoring System - If you wanted the system to automatically monitor active Staff, and clock them out when their schedule is up, you'll need a recurring task, a script that runs every X minutes and clocks out those Staff required.
This isn't a quick and simple project, but it's not very complicated either. The major pitfall you'll need to avoid is the temptation to just code the whole thing yourself. It may seem like a good idea at first, you only need a few hard-coded pages, right? Trust me, though, that process always ends in major headaches later on. Find a Framework that you can base your application on. It's a bit more to learn, but you'll be able to focus more on building your application, and less re-inventing the wheel.
For PHP, I strongly recommend Symfony. It uses Doctrine for it's ORM, which will make it much easier to handle data interactions, and Twig Templating, which is far superior to mixing PHP/HTML directly. Symfony has decent documentation, and a number of tutorials. (And an active Stack Overflow tag.)
Regardless of the choice you make, the best thing to do is choose a framework to base your application on, it'll make all the numerous little design decisions much easier. (And less error-prone for any widely used framework.)
Your individual questions are a little too vague to answer directly without a system around them. I'll try to give some general advice for them, though.
I am starting work on an advanced admin backend panel for my staff, an idea I currently have is to use a MySQLi database to create the staff rota, to be displayed in a simple calendar like table on the aPanel.
You might want to take a look at Full Calendar, a nice customizable JS calendar.
Now, the advanced part is the staff member will be able to click "Clock In" or "Clock Out" during the times/days they are issued on the rota.
When the employee logs in to the application, the application will load the schedule for that employee. If they have a current (or shortly upcoming) assignment, display a Clock In form. The Clock In form, on submit, will change the Employee status to Clocked In, and insert a timestamp into the Timeclock Logs associated with the Employee. If the employee is currently Clocked In, instead display a Clock Out form (possibly with shift notes), that does much the same thing, only switching the status to Clocked Out.
The system will NOT let the staff member Clock In, unless they are on the rota for that time of day.
It's fairly easy to check these sort of things after the Clock In form is submitted. If they aren't supposed to Clock In yet, throw an error. (Note, never assume that the pre-submission validations are sufficient. I.e., don't rely on the fact that the Clock-In form will only show up when the Employee can Clock In.
I will then have access to a management section of the panel allowing me to view the amount of hours the staff member has been clocked in for for if they have missed days, or are late, etc... And pay them for recorded clocked in hours.
In the admin section, you can create a report by getting all the Timeclock logs for a given employee for a given date range, total the hours worked, and compare to the expected schedule.
Maybe some added features would be that they are clocked out automatically at the end of their shift or the system would record overtime and such?
Have a script that runs every X minutes (lower times will have greater resolution, but consume more resources) as a scheduled task on your server, checking every Clocked In employee, and Clocking Out those who should no longer be Clocked In. If you're using Symfony, I'd recommend creating a Custom Console Command for the job.
That's hopefully enough to get you started. Please feel free to come back with any more specific issues that you may run into.