Recently a friend asked me for help in developing a small website working in their their company’s intranet.
Basically it has the following features:
-
Admins can upload an excel sheet containing details of all employees
-
Each employee can login and view their specific details, which is
parsed from the excel sheet -
Admins can create and edit announcements (preferably with text
formatting capabilities)
Q (1) My friend suggested using WordPress in the back-end. Would this be of any advantage over a php site done from scratch, considering the above features?
Q (2) What are the best practices (modules, excel format etc) to be followed for the parsing of data from the spreadsheet? Looking forward to suggestions from people who have worked with similar scenarios.
This sounds simple to implement. Using WP would mean you would have to find a plugin for uploading and parsing the Excel file as well as displaying it to only specific users. I think it would be easier to make a system from scratch. There are plenty of resources for making a simple login system with admins in PHP. You would have to create code to parse the Excel file, but reading it wouldn’t be that difficult thanks to PHP wrappers. There is a PHP wrapper for xls files, that will allow you to open the file normally with any of PHP stream functions (the filename would be
xlsfile://path/to/file.xls) andfread()the data.