Current Trail Conditions Hack Wanted

[gopherhockey]

Current conditions you say? Let me explain... and then you can tell me to just go away, or perhaps that this isn't a hack but more of a php coding thing...

I run a vbulletin site for Minnesota area mountain bikers.. we are just beginning, but expect things to get very busy as the 2003 season approaches.

One thing we would like to do is to have a page where people can update trail conditions for various mountain bike trails in (and around) the state.

I searched a bit, thought a bit about existing hacks that might be easily converted to this.. but haven't come up with anything. I can hack hacks a little, but I'm no huge programmer.. so I'm turning to this group for help or suggestions.

What I can see it looking like would be various columns showing the trail location name, then perhaps a breakdown of the various trails within this location (like a ski resort would have). For each trail: a section to type in general comments, a drop-down box for general labels (closed, wet, stay off, sticky, perfect etc.) and perhaps even graphic labels to go along with these conditions. Of course it would show who reported the condition and when it was last reported. (date, time etc.) To get even more fancy, one could add recent rainfall types of things.. generally these are all just fields that could easily be added using another one as an example I'm sure.

If there got to be too many area trails, the front page of this would probably have to be just a list of the general bike areas and a person might have to drill down to get the various trails and their conditions etc.

We were just going to use vbulletin to post trail condition updates in threads.. but something graphical and simple might promote people to actually view them.

Does anyone have any idea of a current hack that I might be able to use to start something like this? Or, woudl something like this be fairly complex?

We are a non profit organization, but we do have a small budget.. I would even probably go out of pocket if anyone thought it could be done fairly easily.

I'm thinking there are other applications for this type of thing....

Thanks for listening..