An organization has a Joomla based web site, where visitors can find any sort of information about it, like future events, past events, information about this organization, documents, articles.
This organization wants to install a kiosk that will be located in the waiting room of the building where the company operates. The information provided by this kiosk will be almost the same of the web site, but introduced in a slightly different way.
For example a local tourist office could install a small number of kiosks and put them in the most interesting places of the town, so that tourists could use them to know about events, famous buildings and so on.
We want to do this without have a second database that could lead to data inconsistency and double the effort of the maintainers.
First of all, the kiosks must be connected in a local area network, using cables or wireless connections.
Then the Joomla portal will be modified in order to bring that additional value of the kiosk, for example describing only the interesting places around the kiosk, or displaying some useful information that makes little sense on a website but makes a lot of sense in a kiosk.
The kiosk is a computer, with a monitor, an hard disk, a linux operating system, mysql and apache.
The Joomla database is divided in tables, let’s have a look at the tables that will be modified by our kiosk.
The tables that will be different than those of the web site database are jos_content_frontpage, jos_components, jos_modules, jos_menu.
The entire application will be update via the web site administrator interface. We want a way to update the kiosk and keep it up-to-date with the web site data.
How can we do this?
We can use a cronjob that during nighttime creates a web database dump of the tables that we are interested in, like jos_content, jos_categories, jos_sections, jos_banners, jos_polls, and if we have integrated jEvents, also jos_events, jos_events_categories.
Than this database dump will be captured via an FTP server or Web server by the kiosk that will update its database data.
September 24th, 2007 at 10:54 am
This seems half-finished. I was expecting some detail but just got a description of a problem and a fluffy idea with no discussion of the complexities that would arise in the solution and what steps to get over them.