Rescue Centre Software

Some may already know that by trade I am a PHP Developer. A short while back I started building web software for a rescue centre for free, but then for reasons best known only to themselves, they just stopped emailing and the project died.

The software in summary allowed rescue centres to add images and descriptions of dogs within their care, along with various searchable catgories, and allowing people to be emailed when dogs were added within their particular post-code, or matched the particular breed/age/etc they were looking for.

The code got to be about 50% complete and I'm really quite loathed to just dump it. If there is enough interest I'd like to continue it and give it away free to dog rescue centres, with one small caveat.

The caveat being that I would like to be able to gather non-personal statistics of dogs within centres. Such things as county, breed, age, purely for my own point of interest. The data would, most likely, be gathered on a quarterly basis, and only with the prior acknowledgement of the centre owner/manager. There would be no mention of any particular centre in any stats gathered, but rather purely demographic data.

So first question, is there a need for this?
Second question, what features would need to be included. I figure rescue centres know far more about that than I.
Would that caveat present a problem?

Thanks in advance...

I'm surprised that they stopped contacting you I wish I was closer to our rescue centre so I coculd set up an active website & keep the dogs pix etc updated

Wouldn't have thought there would be a problem as you wouldn't have the new home details etc

Yeah, not as surprised as I was. I know that they were extremely busy and I think that having to check x, y, and z were working as they needed to be placed too much of a strain on their already hectic time-schedule. Who's to say...

And no, no new-owner details would be gathered at all. It's just the dogs which pass through the centres that I'm interested in. In fact, certainly as I was writing it, there was no way of recording which dogs had gone to which homes anyway.

To answer a couple of questions that have arisen through PMs.

What would be needed to run it?
Your web server would need to be capable of running both PHP and mySQL, ideally on a LINUX platform. (It usually is anyway)

It is being written for PHP5 and mySQL 5.21 but will work equally well on PHP4 and earlier version of mySQL.

Would my centre be large enough to qualify?
There really wouldn't be a qualification. As I see it, if you had a need for it then you should be perfectly free to make use of it. It's intended to help you, as a centre manager/ess to get a faster turn-around of the dogs from your shelter into new loving homes.

So is this web based? By this, I mean - would the rescue need to have a server, or would they be able to use this program through the internet and a home PC?

Yes, it is web-based. The rescue centre would need access to a server, yes. If they have a website then they have access to a server. Though they may not have PHP and mySQL enabled. A PHP and mysql webspace can be purchased almost ridiculously cheaply these days however.

Cheers

Ok, I did a bit of reading and from what I can gather, PHP is a language like HTML, and MySQL is a format for databases. Both of these are usually supported when you buy webspace and are listed on almost every package I've looked at today

So would you be able to find a webspace provider for the rescue, or would they need to do this?

You read correctly. It's extremely common and it's very much worth shopping around as the prices range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Alternatively, see latest PM sent.

See latest PM.

Just as an update, and until I decide on a new prioduct name and URL (website) to act as a platform for distribution, a few early screens to show that I've decided there is enough interest to continue with it.

These screens are quite boring I'm afraid but...

This is where you would add a new rescue centre details. This is useful if, as one interested party has, you have multiple centres.





This is where you would manage the existing centres that you've previously added. Though not shown here, there is also an "Edit" allowing you to edit each centre's details indicidually.





The Admin menu appears and vanishes as and when needed only, and can be called using the F1 key, or via a mouse click, thus giving the maximum screen space for actually working in.



Soon as I've thought of a decent product name and purchased yet another domain, I'll just post the link (via PM) to those who have expressed an interest, to prevent cluttering Azz's forum up!