Website User Area

I suppose I know the answer to this already, but thought I'd ask here for clarificatuion...

I want a user to be able to login to the website, and then be able to update certain parts of it - e.g. an emergency news section...
Do I really need to go down the CMS route to achieve this, or is there something else I can do instead... I'm assuming I'd need to create a user area with a WYSIWYG editor that will save the message to a database. Then when someone else views the website, that area will pull the message from the database...
It sounds easy enough - and I already know about sessions so a user can login and see a different area to what anyone else can see...

I hope that makes sense,I'd prefer to code this rather than going down a CMS route, where I then have to modify something that has already been designed for these basic needs...

First thing I'd do if you really want to code it yourself is setup the database and ability to display the pages from it. That will give you the basis of what you want.

Then tackle the editing part - there are loads of open source text editors available for websites - find one you like and use that.

Remember that if you want to handle images then you need to make sure that whatever you are using is capable of doing that. Plus you might want to allow tables, etc. Do you want your editors to be able to code directly in HTML but also have the WYSIWYG editing capability.

Then, setup the security so you can control who edits what (or just control who can edit if you want to make it simple).

And that's it, job done. Obviously it will take a little while - a CMS could do it out of the box but may not be what you want.

This site itself does a similar thing to what you want and is heavily customised by the owners (and more recently by Row who seems to be making all sorts of changes to the way it works now).

personally i like the cms route, it's quicker to strip out all the crud you don't want than it is to build something similar from scratch, especially if you're looking at a multiple user setup.

i'll pm you with an example - i'm not particularly bothered about publicising the site on here

Like I said, sounds simple, just didn't know whether it's worth spending many hours configuring a CMS to look exactley like your website, just for having a few extra feature, or better to just code it from scratch/use open source scripts...

Being relatively new to php, it'd be nice to be able to code this stuff to give me a better understanding when playing with CMS in the future...

Cheers for the pm, I'll read it properly in a mo... I believe there will only be about 3 or 4 users who will be authorised to amend the information on the site. I'll be taking care of the infrastructure.

I'm going to have to organise a meeting with some members of staff who will be dealing with this... That way I can assess what functionality is required from the website
It doesn't help that with all the websites I have built previously, none of the contacts I had, really knew what they wanted a website for, let alone functionality or content.

Edited by deleted (Thu 05-Feb-09 15:16:29)

If you are going to build the system yourself take a look at
http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/

I found this very useful when I did a similar project.

Programming your own login is fairly straight forward. You'd have a database with user names and (encrypted) passwords. Now, using a session variable like $loggedIn, if it is not set, save the current URL in another session variable, redirect to a login screen with two fields for user and password. The latter is submitted and checked against the DB entries, if correct, re-direct back to the original URL still saved in an session variable, which can now be cleared.

As regards online editing of pages: I assume they are stored in a database, read from there and then presented as an editable webpage. You can use the online WYSIWYG FCKEditor, it's quite powerful.

Cheers, I'm having a look at that now

I've already got a login system working, even gone slightly more advanced to specify different account types so people will only be able to do certain things with each account type. My only problem is they have nothing to login to at the moment as no one has provided any information about what these users should be able to do

The web pages aren't stored in a database at the moment, so I'm looking at how to do that... Thanks for the editor, I'll look into that...

In reply to a post by metalhead41:

It doesn't help that with all the websites I have built previously, none of the contacts I had, really knew what they wanted a website for, let alone functionality or content.

That is unfortunately the worst type of client possible............ Know from experience!!!

It just seems like they want to boast to friends about owning a website, but in actual fact they don't even need one...

My biggest flaw, is I'm not much of a designer (inspiration wise). If someone drew what they wanted on paper, gave me colour schemes etc... then I could reproduce it perfectly. If they say "you decide" then I don't have a clue