Showing Lab Availability in Drupal

You can now let people know how many machines are available in Middlebury computer labs in your department, building, or campus-wide. Add the following short codes to any content in our Drupal site.

[labserver] Shows the total number of available lab machines on campus.
[labserver 65] Shows the total number of available lab machines in lab 65, which is LIB 105.
[labserver 65,43,58,15,13,14] Shows the total number of available lab machines in multiple labs. In this case I’ve listed all of the labs in the Davis Family Library.

To get the number for a lab, you can go to the main LabStats page and click on one of the labs. The URL will content some text like “id=65” and that is the number to use in the short code. The LabStats site also has a lot of other information about our computing labs.

Thanks to Petar Mitrevski for helping out with some configuration on the LabStats site to support this new feature.

2 thoughts on “Showing Lab Availability in Drupal

  1. Brenda

    Thanks Ian. Not sure what the display will look like, but this is a nice feature that I’ve seen on other library sites. Would be great to have this somewhere on the LIS, Library, and Helpdesk webpages.

    Reply
    1. Ian McBride Post author

      And thank you for suggesting this feature. As to the display, the code just gives you the number of available machines in plain text, allowing the site editor to decide how it should appear.

      Reply

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