Need a CMS with a highly customizable member system...

Hi,

I'm revamping the website for a high school marching band, and right now it's really just a Invision forum with a Portal for the main page. I've made many attempts at modifications in the past, some successful, some not. But now the code's a mess, and it's outdated anyway, so I'm thinking of just throwing it out and creating a whole new website for their summer/fall season. Problem is I don't know PHP well enough to create my own system from scratch and in the time I have.

I'm trying to find a CMS preferably free or open source, though if absolutely none exists, I can afford a small fee... I need something with a good member system. I want to be able to give each member in the band their own account, and have things for them when they log in. For example, if someone loses their drill charts/formation coordinate sheets, they can log in and view/print out their unique coordinate sheets. Or maybe the music to the school song that's written for their specific instrument. So basically something where they can access unique files based on their login. And of course, some type of article/announcement feature, forum, and image gallery would be preferable, though my main focus is getting one with a member system as described.

If anyone has any recommendations I could check out, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

 

koobi ....dream4.de

 

xoops - you can set different user levels in xoops and have different content displayed based on their user level.

RC

 

erm...I need something where I can have different content per user... is there anything like that out there?

 

This one is easy, check out Joomla! Totally free, and from what it sounds like, it has what you are looking for right out of the box. Plus tons of free plug-ins, etc.

Hope this helps,
Morty

 

My vote goes to joomla as well.

You can do that with joomla

 

Check out OpenSourceCMS for some info on a variety of choices. If you are looking for fine grained control over site content and how the users interact with the content then PostNuke is the best choice available. Joomla/Mambo does content on an OK level, but there are many choices you should review.

I would start your review with the major choices:

PostNuke (http://www.postnuke.com)
Drupal
Jommla/Mambo

Hope this helps and if you have any specific questions let me know, I'd be happy to help since I've been in this space as a developer and designer from the beginning.

 

Hi,

ok, so I installed Joomla, and a new forum to go with it. Anyway, I looked around Joomla's settings, but there's nothing there that looks like what I'm needing (different content per user). I asked on Joomla's boards:

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,75899.0.html

And they basically said it couldn't be done.

I was informed by a few of you here that said it could be done...any help? Whether it's included, available via extension, or not included, I need to know soon. I'm in the process of making a Joomla template because this site needs to be online by July 30, with those specific files available to individual users in time for them to download and print their drill charts for when marching band camp starts the next day.

So since you all seemed more knowledgeable about this being done in Joomla, I'm hoping someone here can help me asap. Let me know.

 

Hi RayCP,
I misunderstood your original post. Joomla can't do what you want out of the box. Sorry

However using JACLPlus extnesion should do the trick , you would just need to create a user group for each user. http://www.byostech.com/content/view/8/12/

You may want to consider just sorting users by instrument then organized by person (anyone could access any content though). For example instrument would be the section, and then each person would be a category. Depending on how big the band is, creating "individual access rights" may become a content maintenance nightmare for you (no matter what plug in you use). Just my unsolicited 2 cents.

Let us know if this works out for you
Morty

 

What do you mean by anyone could access any content? Do you mean within each section? I don't mind making say all the drill charts for all the clarinets open to all the clarinets... I just don't want these drill charts as openly available as there for whole public to download. Also, I don't want members to have to sort through a large amount of files just to find theirs...it may get confusing. I'm sure they could if it was just all the drill charts in their own section, say the clarinets. Is that what you mean by anyone could access any content or what?

And is that the only extension I would need and it should work? Thanks.

 

What I meant was that any band members could see any other band members content. So a clarinet could view a Trombones drill sheet. If you don't care if band members can see each others content, then you may be able to just use Joomla out of the box.

What may work is this type of structure:

First all band members would be registered, and all of their content would be restricted to registered members (this would elimainte the public accessing it).

Then you create sections for each instrument type that is only available to registerd users, so for example:
Sections:
Clarinet
Trombone
Trumpet.

Then under each Instrument, you create an appropriate "category" that is only available for registered users, for your example above it would be "drill sheets".

Then you post each drill sheets as an individual "article" (retricted to registered users) underneath the Category Drill Sheets.

So for Clarinet Drill Sheets, the content structure would be:
Section: Clarinet
Category: Drill Sheets.
Article: Drill Sheet A

When a band member logs in, the navigation would be organized by instrument, so if I were a clarinet, I would click on the clarinet navigation button. Then I would see all of the content that pertained to clarients...

Hopefully this makes sense.

If you need to get more granular than that with user groups and permissions then the JACL Plus should do the trick. I have never used it, but from what it sounds like it can do what you want.

So if you wanted to have a user group for Clarinets, you can create this user group. Then anyone assigned to clarinets would only be able to view items in the Clarienets "user group". You would just have to create a user group for each instrument type, etc.

If you wanted to designate content by individual then I think (based on the extensions web page) you would need to create an actual user group for each individual. IMHO, even though the extension can do this, it would be a nightmare to manage. But I am just lazy

Morty