Website to take notes and e-mail them

Question

Background: I'm a Technical Director at a church. My background is more with AV than IT, but I wear both hats here. I'm alright with computers, but website development beyond basic HTML is something I have little experience with.

Need: We're developing a new website geared towards mobile use. In particular, we want to develop a way to display sermon lessons with a portion where users can take there own notes. At they end, the user can e-mail a copy.

The idea is based on these sites: cotm.info hopechurch.xyz

I'm not sure where to start. I know this is more than just HTML and CSS. JavaScript? PHP?

One of the sites was kind enough to let me know they used Laravel, CraftCMS and VUE. I had a look at Laravel, and it looks like a solid set of tools, but I'm not sure what I need.

Thanks

Answer 1

Option 1

The easiest way would be opening the user's email client and having them email the note content to their self. This would ultimately come down to one line of code:

location.href = 'mailto:[email protected]?subject=my_subject&body=body_content'

Option 2

Since you seem willing to get your hands dirty with some programming, you can set up a server to receive these notes and email them from an internal email address. If you would just like to stick to using one programming language, you can use JavaScript on the frontend/client and on the backend/server.

The technologies you will want to look into are:

• NodeJS - the platform you'll be writing JS in on the server
• ExpressJS - a library for easy setup of a server
• Nodemailer - a library for sending emails
• Fetch - an API for sending requests to a server from a client

Once you figure out how to get your users to write notes on the site, you can use these technologies to send that textual information to your sever, where you'll be signed in to an email service, which you will use to email the formatted information. Then you can do all kinds of fun stuff once you have a server set up, like pushing data to the client on the fly using Socket.IO, a library for realtime messaging between client and server. You could even set up a little chatting system, but that's besides the point.

BTW I also do some work for a church in the way of media (presenting content in-house as well streaming), and some IT and development stuff. Happy Programming!