Questions concerning groups, setup, and custom pages

Wednesday 21 April 2004 12:58:10 pm

Hi, I've been testing and installing about 942 different CMS systems! ezPublish installed very easily and looks great. I just have some questions:

I have to install a template site (a shop, corporate, gallery, etc) on startup and it warns me that these use different databases. Can't I have a shop with a gallery that is also a corporate blog? This confused me a little. Is this just a starting point? Can I make my own site once I learn the basics that has everything I want in it?

Users and groups. Can I make custom groups like GroupA and GroupB. GroupA is a basic member and he/she can see menu items 1 and 2, while menu 3 is not even visible in the list. GroupB is a premium member and they have access to menu items 1,2 and 3. Is this possible?

Next, when someone signs up (or buys a subscription) can the signup form be customized to add a field like "which group would you like to join?" and then a dropdown of say GroupA and GroupB. Then that info gets sent to the admin (or even better, is automated). So when I allow their account I can put them in the group of their choice.

Thanks!

Tuesday 27 April 2004 6:43:54 pm

Dave - I believe that all of the things that you are asking can be done with ez.

If you have a month or so before you need to go live, you can install the 3.4 alpha 3 which allows you select funtionality to include in your install, and it combines all the functions into one site. If you can't wait, these functions can be created in one site, but it is a lot more work. You can also add and customize each datatype with quite a bit of control. If the user setup does not suit your needs, you can just edit the user "class" by adding some more fields or options. I do not think a drop down is an option, but check boxes, multiselects, and several other options can handle that.

Based on the user group, you can control their access. The access control scheme is very powerful, and allows for a great degree of control. The menus are invisible if you have not given that user (or their group) read permissions to that type of content, section of content, or page of content.

All forms can be customized, in this case the register.tpl (when they sign up). I am not sure what the best way would be to auto-assign them to a particular group, but my guess is to have two registration pages, one for each type. Otherwise, you can use the workflow function to handle the registration process and automate the grouping process.

I have found that ez works very well in these situations, and though the template code is a bit tough to a non-programmer, there are lots of snippets of sample code that can be cobbled together to get things done.

To your new question, you can give users in a particular group the ability to self-edit, which means that they can only edit their own user record. This seems like it is the type of function that you need. Normally I think this is used to change your password for admin users, but the permission can be applied to an user. You just have to give them access to their page with an edit template.

Hope that helps....

Mark

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