I would like to build a SaaS that performs like the following and I am checking out Elgg,SocialEngine, and PHPFox to see if any of these fit the bill.
I would like to keep the site private (no public info shown)
Organizations can signup (administer of org is charged)
Orgs have members who dont pay subscription fee
Orgs can have sub-groups/communities that are viewable within the org but not viewable to other orgs or if private
Orgs cannot see other orgs or content of other orgs
features of orgs allows communications with groups, event planning, shared docs, social integration, etc
Can any php or maybe rails based software do this without heavy modification?
Elgg can do this, but it would require a fair bit of coding - not so much for the multi-site part, there's a plugin for that, but just to customize the site. For example, if you want to have a fully featured "event planning" page, you'd probably have to write that...but I'd guess that this would be the case with pretty much any framework.
SocialEngine could do this however every organization would need its own license and working copy of SocialEngine unless you were to customize your version of SocialEngine to handle these organizations and their privacies and abilities. If you purchase your own copy of SocialEngine, all source code is available to you and you are free to customize the code to create the site that best suits your needs as you deem fit.
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I´m currently developing the Intranet for the company I am working for. The site is currently based on SharePoint, but I have to migrate it to Wordpress. And that´s my first developer experience with Wordpress, you just should know. Creating the theme, content and working with the WP Admin area works very well, but where I´m feeling defenseless is the permissions topic.
Generally, the whole page content is managed by the Marketing department. So, for me it is ok that they have access to WP Admin and I would use one of the predefined roles available.
But there will be also an area for the departments where specified users per department should be able to
edit the pre created page content
add subpages and edit its content (it would be nice if it can be defined which page templates can be selected by the user)
add posts for a pre created category (that should not be changeable by the user)
edit its profile and password
A whole access to WP Admin should be therefore prevented.
I read much information about roles, capabilities and reviewed forums and blogs presenting potential plugins. But to be honest, I´ve lost the overview and I´m totally scared about what´s the right way to do such like this the professional way.
Is there anybody who was already in such a situation or knows a good resource where to read more?
Thanks a lot.
John
PressPermit is the tool I choosed. It covers all needs described in my question.
Note: To use all features, you need to buy a support subscription currently available for $55 a year for one site.
However, a very powerful tool and in comparison to Advanced Access Manager I tried before, it really supports permissions also for multiple roles.
If you are thinking about, use the screencasts to see if the tool cover your needs. Unfortunately, there is no trial available, but you can request an evolution wordpress installation which was setup within one day in my case. This service costs $5.
I need a little bit help with user management.
I have an education site (not ready yet), i need two registration:
First for students, they can register to courses with name, email, phone number etc.
Second for teachers, who can register with name, email, year of birth etc., but teachers can register for courses too.
But when a teacher wants to register for courses too, i want that she/he can use same email address, name etc. too. And i want it, after a teacher register both place, on the wp-admin/users i see just one registration.
There is any plugin which is easy to do it?
Thanks for your help!
The answer is 'no' there is no easy plugin for this. I'm DV the question though.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you not use Wordpress for this website and you consider building everything yourself. You are already hitting the constraints of Wordpress in that it is difficult to assign multiple roles and manage them consistently. I'm going to take another guess and say that even if you launch using Wordpress, you'll quickly outgrow it and need to rewrite your entire application.
If you build the application yourself, you can design the user database however you want and allow users to have one or more roles (i.e. student and/or teacher). Then your application can use the roles a user has to determine what to display to them.
If you want to reduce your overall dev time, piece together third-party APIs and tools. If you are using Node.js, check out Keystone.js (http://keystonejs.com), Hatch (http://hatchjs.com), and other CMS tools. You can also look for a user database like Passport (https://www.inversoft.com/products/user-database-sso) that give you a bunch of user management features. There are tons of free or open-source tools out there that can help you build this application quickly.
I need to borrow some wisdom from a Drupal expert.
We are hiring a marketing firm to build our website. They are building the front end using Drupal 7, and hiring yet another firm to do the programming. Once the front is complete, they will be handing it to me to implement the shopping cart and eCommerce, along with integrating into our CRM and ERP
From what little I've worked with Drupal, I know that it generally manages everything as a chunk of content. I am also aware that you can create a custom content type which we could build to make a product model. And I have read in a few places that Ubercart can use this to build the product catalog essentially.
So, if I allow them to continue in this way, will there be a way for me to pull or update information about products through an API (SOAP or otherwise)? Is there a better alternative?
My concern is that handling products as content seems a bit flimsy, and I fear that when it comes time to link together our CRM and ERP, that I won't have any way (short of working with the database directly), to update or pull information. Ultimately, the goal is to have Drupal only deal with layout and actual content, and our ERP/CRM duo will handle maintaining product information. Is there an established method or best practice for what we are looking to do?
++ I'm more interested in the database structure than anything else.
I think it depends on what type of products are you going to sell, are you going to sell them online and regarding to this realize which software will be primary(master) and which one will be secondary(slave).
If you plan just to tell people you have several products you can store these products inside ERP and then export ERP/CRM products data and import them into Drupal on a daily basis. ERP/CRM will be your master storage then.
If you plan to sell something online and you have to manage stock levels then you can follow one of these solutions (or make up another one):
ERP/CRM is a master storage for everything (products, clients, stock levels). Drupal is used only for authentication process and for your products storage "gateway" so your site visitors will browse through your site and that browsing won't affect your ERP/CRM but if one will buy something you will let Drupal get all information abuot logged customer and let him boy something regarding to your stock levels.
Drupal is a master storage for everything. I think this is not a good idea because you already have ERP/CRM, products, descriptions and so on so you will need to make them synchronized and that's always lots of hard work.
ERP+CRM are for products and clients offline, Drupal is for e-commerce only. You just need to export your products from your ERP system and import them into your Drupal site on a daily basis. Then if someone will want to buy something online he will interact with Drupal site (cart, checkout etc).
Technically importing/exporting nodes is not as difficult as it could be. For instance you just create a stdClass() object, fill its values ($node->title, $node->body, etc) then call node_prepare(), node_save() and that's all.
If you could provide more information about your business and what are you going to do with your Drupal site, maybe, you will get more answers. Also sorry for my English, I'm not native.
I'm not entirely sure how to properly ask this, so please bear with me.
I have an idea for a site I would like to build, which would basically be a site for members to create some data and have it housed in my database. I would like to offer a value-add to the site which would allow people to spin off their own website via my own "website builder" tool (probably some sort of CMS). Their website would be able to communicate with my master database to display their data.
Getting down to the crux of the topic, I'm looking for architectural advice/ideas/etc. regarding what services I could use to do this. I'm not looking a 100% automated solution, but something along these lines (which may not be completely correct, I admit):
Customer puts in an order to create their own site, using my tools.
I setup a separate domain for them, roll out the CMS foundation to the site, and the customer has full editing control of the CMS to design it however they would like.
The CMS would have some customizations so that it includes functionality to call APIs located on the master site, which would return the relevant data.
In the research I have done on SO, I've seen a lot of mentions of Umbraco which honestly looks like a good start. I'm just worried that when I go to upgrade a version, I have to deal with overwriting my custom API functionality. I'm guessing this is the nature of the beast, and requires me to accept/plan for it.
Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Some high-level starting points? Thanks!
I've been thinking about this same issue for my customers.
It is not hard to automatically roll out a stock cms such as Wordpress or Joomla. This sort of thing is done all the time by "1 click installers" that DreamHost and others have.
Including custom widgets or plugins for the CMS that can connect to your main app is also not hard.
For dns, you can use Amazon Route 53 or other DNS services that include a good api at the dns management level.
I suggest that you focus on using a CMS that is very popular (eg Wordpress or Joomla) rather than something less well known such as Umbraco. Using a more popular system will drastically reduce your training costs--remember that if you supply the CMS to your customers, then they'll also expect you to supply the support for it...
There are any number of membership plugins for Wordpress that exist to monetize website content. People pay a subscription and have access to pages and posts. This makes it difficult to locate what I am looking for.
Is there a plugin that is specifically for managing the membership in an organization?
WHAT IT SHOULD DO
Have the ability to import existing
membership details and create WP
users from those details.
Automate and manage the
collection of annual dues.
Facilitate mass e-mails to members.
Restrict access to some of the Web site pages
perhaps by linking membership to WP
roles.
Perhaps manage payments for conferences.
Have the ability to export membership details.
SOME THINGS IT SHOULD NOT DO
Have pay per post functionality.
Sell value added pages.
Have different levels of accounts based on content.
TIA
I was looking for a similar plugin for a non-profit organization client of mine, and finally found MemberMouse. I was particularly concerned about being able to setup annual dues at a certain time of the year with pro-rating for new members during the rest of the year. While this is not in their base plugin, they can custom program that for a small fee.
The only parts of your request that plugin may not cover is facilitating mass emails (you could manage that through something like Constant Contact) and taking payments for conferences (which you could setup on your site anyway pretty easily using PayPal or your merchant account provider and a cart).
Hope this helps. I would suggest contacting MemberMouse with your questions to see if it will work for you.