What is StatusPanic?

StatusPanic is a simple PHP system for creating a way to make a Panic-style Status Board with as little effort as possible.

Configuration

Configuring StatusPanic is basically the first and last step of getting it running. Options are specified in JSON in config.json. There's a config-defaults.json file that gives some idea of how this should be set up. Args can be provided to a module via a GET request by adding them to an ARGS array.

An 'update' of 0 indicates that module doesn't require updates, and thus whatever is loaded the first time is what remains.

How It Works

The modules are loaded on the initial page load. From there, .load() is used to update each module every x seconds, where x is specified in config.json for each module. You could have some modules refresh every minute and others refresh every week. Cheat sheet: 60 seconds is a minute, 3600 is an hour, 86400 a day, and 604800 a week.

Writing a Module

The board looks for modules based on their "type", which should be a folder in the /modules directory. It then loads /modules/%type%/?arg1=foo&arg2=bar for every module defined in the JSON, and, optionally, includes a css file it looks for at /modules/%type%/%type%.css. Although the index is written in PHP, you could theoretically write a module in any language. Modules can subsequently utilize data from any source which can be maniuplated programatically.

Libraries that more than one module might need access to, such as the PHP Magpie RSS library, should be placed in /shared-libraries.

Contributing

To contribute, simply fork this project, commit your changes there, and create a pull request.

To-dos

• continue updating the css
• more modules?
• get the demo running, yet again