Employee Schedule In Webflow

Design help General
1

Hello All,

I have a client who wants to put up their employees’ weekly schedules. I’m trying to make it very easy for them to use through the Webflow editor, but I can’t seem to find a way. The only solution that I have found is to create a static page with the weekly schedules and my client can go in and change the schedule every week. But this runs into a few problems. The main one being they need me again if they decide to fire or hire an employee. For CMS, I just can’t figure out a way that looks good for the visitor AND is easy to use for my client. Is there a way to do this with CMS or a third party extension that would do the job? Any help is much appreciated. Thank You!!

2

I would say that if you set the CMS up correctly they shouldn’t need to contact you if any users needed to be added or removed later down the line.

You would set the system up so that you have a separate CMS “Collection Page” for each employees’ schedule listed in the CMS.

If there was one CMS entry per employee - and a CMS entry was added or removed later down the line - then the “collection item” for that employee would also be added or removed automatically.

A good way to approach this would be to set up a CMS “Collection Page” with a static design at first and then swap out each piece of information that needs to be updated by binding it to the relevant CMS field. If you are following the video course below, each employee would be a “collection item”.

You could even set up a “landing page” that automatically displayed a full list of employees currently in the CMS (using a collection list on a regular page) which would link to the individual “schedule page” for each employee when you clicked on it.

This Webflow University course would be a great place to start researching how to do this.

3

Thank you so much for taking time to have a look at my problem. I have used Webflow’s dynamic CMS in the past, and I am familiar with how it works. I’ll try to be as detailed as possible as to what my client is wanting.

They run a music school and each teacher (the employee) as a certain number of students per day that take thirty minute time slots each. Lets say a proxy name of Dave is one of the teachers and he teaches Jack, Jan, Jinny, and James on Monday for thirty minutes each form 2pm - 4pm. Then on Wednesday, Dave teaches Tim, Tom, and Tammy from 1:30 pm to 3pm, then he has a thirty minute break to 3:30pm, and then he teaches Adam, Amy, and Allan form 3:30pm to 5pm.

Each student listed on the schedule needs to have their name and the instrument they take. The teachers schedules have availability each day (Mon - Sat) from 9am to 9pm (8:30pm - 9pm is the last available time slot). If you segment each time slot for one day, that is 24 slots. Multiply that by 5 for each day and you’ve got 120.

So, if I start to put this together, I have a CMS for each teacher, but because there is a limit of 30 fields for Webflow CMS, I can’t just put all of the available time slots they have there. So then I need to create a 26 field (24 for each time slot, 1 for the day of the week, and one reference field for the teacher it belongs to) CMS for the days that they work that points back to its corresponding teacher. However, because I need the student’s name, time, and instrument, Those 25 fields in the CMS accounting for days need to be reference fields pointing to yet another CMS for each student. However, you can’t have 25 reference fields. You can only have 5.

If I take a different approach. I can have a CMS for the teachers, and another CMS for the students. The teacher’s CMS would just be their name. The student’s CMS would be their name, instrument, teacher, day, and time. Then I would go to the teacher’s dynamic page and style it with a static schedule with empty slots and fill each of those slots with individual collection lists and do some crazy filtering. But this solution will require a lot of code and keeping up with the students enrolled, student time changes, and student cancelations gets very confusing and tedious for my client.

I think my approach is just all off if I am going to solve this problem dynamically with CMS. So sorry for the supper long response. Just trying to take you through my thought process so you can see my errors. Again, thank you to anyone taking time our of your day to try and help me with this. I’m just completely stuck…

4

From what I know so far, and from what I am assuming, I would say maybe the best solution might be to use Google Calendars (or similar 3rd party calendar solution) which gives the ability to schedule lessons in the way you describe and the calendars can be linked together and managed by one central administrator if necessary. If you think Google Calendar may work for you it is possible to embed the calendars into Webflow using an iframe.

If you added the Google Calendar (one google calendar for each teacher) to the individual page for each teacher (which would include the student name and time of the lesson) you could use the Webflow CMS in addition to this to also include information about each student enrolled with that teacher and what instruments they play separately on the same page. For the teacher it would be simply a matter of looking at the calendar to see the name of the student and then looking at a table of student information located just below the calendar for the information they need about instruments etc.