After my last blog post concerning the Conductor update, I received the following email:
You can’t just put a “teaser” in your blog and not expect questions. Can you share any details? Functionality, basic design premise? I know of some departments who want to purchase and link and external db to their website. If this is what I’m thinking it would save them time and money.
My response:
The short of it is that each site will be able to define multiple tables (I.e. Professor and Course). Each table can have custom fields (first name, last name, course name, professor). Conductor will store that information and allow it to be retrieved and rendered within a Conductor page, a general table listing or by way of the database API (JSON or XML, CSV).
The custom database will also provide:
- Rudimentary search
- Simple relationships (i.e. the records in the assignments table belong to a record in the class table)
- CSV import with the option to "start over", "add & update", and "add & ignore."