Fields and/or pages with external data source

[BiGFooT]

Hello,

I'm in the making of a veteran cars community site where the members can publish information about their cars. It's necessary to distinguish public/members only/private visibility (and searchable) fields. Without PW, this functionality is already available (see the attached example), but it would be lovely to integrate/blend it to the site. From my understanding, PW fields are stored in their own tables, but I don't see how it's possible to access this fields with "vehicle identifier" or other identifier.

Can any of you point me out an example of external data handling or a hint about where to start? I know, it's not the best to use a CMS for a community maintained database, but the other features of PW is just too good to pass on it.

[szabesz]

Welcome to the forums,

10 hours ago, BiGFooT said:

I know, it's not the best to use a CMS for a community maintained database, but the other features of PW is just too good to pass on it.

Well, it depends. ProcessWire is a CMS/CMF designed for sites like the one you need to build, so it should be a good fit. ProcessWire is not a "classic" CMS which provides general purpose frontend "themes", instead, it "only" provides demo "site profiles" (PW's terminology for pre-made frontends) which can be starting points to implement your own frontend based on the ProcessWire API.

Anyway, I don't think I properly understand what you are asking. Are you asking how to setup ProcessWire templates and fields in order to design the ProcessWire database so that you can import an existing cars' database into ProcessWire? Or are you also interested in how to implement the frontend to enable site visitors to search and browse the database? Or maybe you are asking about both? Do you need frontend at all or you are thinking of setting up the ProcessWire admin backend so that it is also used to manage different "members"? The latter solution can be desirable if the site is more like a database management software and does not require any graphic design.

Either way, I recommend installing ProcessWire with the Skyscrapers Profile in order to study how templates and fields are set up and how search and pagination are implemented for the frontend:
https://github.com/dadish/pw-skyscrapers-profile