CodeIgniter 3 Attendance SMS Automation

I run a school management portal built on CodeIgniter 3. When I record daily attendance, I need the system to fire an SMS instantly to every student marked “Absent.” The SMS gateway is already wired into the project and working for other modules, so what’s left is to hook the attendance-saving logic to that gateway.

Scope of work
• Extend the existing attendance controller/model so that, the moment I hit “Save,” it fetches all newly-marked absent student records, pulls their registered phone numbers, and triggers one SMS per student through the current gateway helper.
• Message content can remain a single template I’ll supply (“You were absent today…”), but keep it in one place for easy editing.
• Return clear success/failure feedback in the UI and log each send attempt (status, timestamp, student ID) to a table or log file—whatever fits best with CodeIgniter conventions.
• Make sure the change doesn’t slow down the save action noticeably; if you need to queue, use CI’s built-in job or an Ajax callback so the teacher isn’t waiting.

Acceptance criteria
– On pressing “Save,” every absent student receives the SMS within seconds.
– Send log is viewable from the admin panel.
– No impact on present-student records or existing SMS features.
– Code is clean, commented, and follows CodeIgniter 3 MVC structure so I can merge it into Git without fuss.

If you’ve tackled real-time notifications in CodeIgniter before, this should be a quick in-and-out job. I’ll give you Git access and a staging DB dump so you can verify everything before pushing to production.