Does PW have ...

[Peter Knight]

After Ryan's post yesterday re. the new Login Module I was thinking how great it is to finally have this in the core. I get asked a little about Login Modules when I show PW to people.

Just out of curiosity, what type of features are you asked about when showing PW to your peers?

Here's the top 5 FAQs I'm usually asked.

Does it have ...

• user login/out and membership management
• have good SEO support
• image cropping incl media management
• versions or drafts capability with approval process
• e commerce

And then sometimes ...

• page builder type fields (Matrix I guess)
• Multilingual support
• Taxonomy / tags / categorisation
• Blogging 
• Web forms

What kind of stuff do you get asked about? 

 

 

 

 

 

[BitPoet]

Nearly all of my projects are intranet solutions or limited-audience web applications rather than web sites, so my top requested features differ a bit:

• Sufficiently fine-grained permission system (check)
• Drag & drop support for files (check)
• Multilanguage support (check)
• Approval process (currently testing that with ProDrafts )
• Interfaces to third party software (Active Directory, SAP, time keeping software, DMS etc., check, all of those easy to integrate with a few lines of code )
• Sign in using credentials from above software (check, just a few lines...)
• Advanced search that supports (Word, Excel, PDF...) files and honors permissions (done with UserGroups and OpenSearchServer)

[Peter Knight]

45 minutes ago, BitPoet said:

Drag & drop support for files (check)

Really interesting requirements there.

I'm assuming your intranets have a ton of files. How do you handle these?

• Use a file field on a page by page basis
• Create separate pages to represent each file
• Use a single page to act as a bucket for all files
• something completely different

 

[psy]

Why isn't it WordPress? 

[matjazp]

1 hour ago, BitPoet said:

Advanced search that supports (Word, Excel, PDF...) files and honors permissions (done with UserGroups and OpenSearchServer)

Can you tell more about that?

[BitPoet]

1 hour ago, Peter Knight said:

I'm assuming your intranets have a ton of files. How do you handle these?

• Use a file field on a page by page basis
• Create separate pages to represent each file
• Use a single page to act as a bucket for all files
• something completely different

It's a mixed approach. I use page-per-file to inline our most important process documentation PDFs enhanced with keywords, tags and meta data, most with all the niceties of built-in multi-language support. Our construction pages make heavy use of my MediaLibrary module for images and shared reference docs. A lot of department docs are added to simple file fields, and, to round everything off, version critical files (like technical drawings) stay on our network shares but our editors can easily add links to those through custom built CKEditor extensions. There's a bit of tag and save handler magic as well as prepend scripting going on so these files (and ones resting in the DMS) are available through URLs (either segments or get params), permissions are honored and they can be found in the search.

[BitPoet]

1 hour ago, matjazp said:

Can you tell more about that?

From the top of my head: I've built a small schema for OSS that has the following additional fields:

• PW language name
• groups (multivalued)
• page id
• type indicator field for file or page to limit results to one of those if required
• an additional file classification field to search for special documents (e.g. process instructions, sales catalogs...)

In a save handler, I call my search update routine that:

• removes all entries in OSS for the current page id
• includes the search engine update logic for the current template that in turn:
  • extracts the content
  • extracts information on all files that should be in the search
  • adds a search entry through OSS' REST API for each of those for each language with page id, language, type and all permitted groups

My search routine then only needs to pass the current user's groups (from @apeisa's essential UserGroups module) and optionally the language to the search API as facet filters to get permission-filtered results.

I'm in the process of moving the actual update action to background batch jobs since the number of files and their sizes are constantly growing, slowing down page editing. This will have the nice added effect that I can run the updating logic on one or more different servers by sharing the file system between them.

And, of course, there's a script for worst cases that runs through all pages and builds the search index from scratch.