Best way to create a "mark article as read" type checklist?

I’ve been wracking my brain on this for a little while now. I currently have a Wayfinder-generated list of member pages on my website, which I am using as an outline. What I would like to do is allow the members to check off articles as they read them or feel they’re done with them. It doesn’t have to do anything fancy, just put a check mark or something next to the article name on the list.

Originally, I thought about using checkbox inputs and cookies, but frankly I can’t find a place to even start with that. There are tons of threads around Google with scripts and people asking for help, but I can’t seem to figure any of them out or get off the ground with my own.

Then I got to thinking, is there a way to store something like this so it persists even if a user clears their cookies? I would imagine it would need to be in a database or something? At which point I really have no idea where to start.

Hopefully that’s not too vague, and I appreciate any help. If you can give me something simple, so I can see how it works and learn it, that would be great. But, if it has to be complicated, then it has to be complicated, and I’ll try to pick it up.

First thing that comes to mind - and I really haven’t thought this through - is to look at extending modUser and creating a table to track which articles each user has marked as read.

You’ll need to somehow integrate this with getResources (or I think you mentioned Wayfinder?) so it checks against this table and outputs the ’read’ status when listing your articles - or build a custom listing snippet.

Finally, a ’mark as read’ link for each article hooked up to some ajax code could update the ’read’ table when clicked.

Does that make sense at all?

Yeah, that makes sense. Or, the concept does anyway, admitadely I haven’t worked with most of tools/processes you suggested . So, it will take quite a bit of learning on my part. Thankfully I managed to get a cookie based version working, which will suffice while I mess with that!

Thanks!