Processwire or Custom Application

[Jonathan Dart]

Hi Guys,

We're taking on a project that my instincts tell me should be built as a custom application rather than on processwire, but maybe you can prove me wrong. I'll try to boil it down to the most relevant parts.

This website will have 2 roles of interest:

• "Mini site" operators
  • They will have predefined pages they can manage, photo albums, event calendars, and blog posts. They will not be able to edit content from other mini sites or the god user's content. They will also be able to add arbitrary subpages to one of the predefined pages. 
• A "God" user that can manage the mini sites, and create content just like from the mini sites, but for the main site.

My biggest concern is that I don't know of a way of restricting the processwire admin to only allowing the mini site operators to manage their own content. If you could control the root page shown in the admin to be something other than the real homepage, that could work but I have a feeling things could get hairy.

What do you guys think? Does processwire sounds like a good fit for this project? Have you tackled a "portal" site like this before?

Thanks,

Jonathan

[Craig]

I think ProcessWire will be able to handle this fine, with a bit of custom code thrown in.

Ryan created a Page Edit Per User "proof of concept" module to demonstrate how a role can be used to restrict the editing of certain pages, so this will be an ideal place to start at.

[Marty Walker]

Hi Jonathan,

Mary started a similar discussion a while back:

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/4349-thousands-of-pages-one-site-with-multiple-pages-or-one-install-with-multiple-sites/

I don't think it touches on user roles but as Craig said some custom code might do the trick.

[renobird]

I'm nearly done with a site that has a very similar setup. It is definitely possible. The module linked above works well. In my case each mini-site admin can see the other sites, but doesn't have edit privs.

If you had to hide the other sites, you could probably hide the main page tree and create a custom admin page that showed a truncated page tree starting at the top level page the mini site admin is allowed to edit.

[einsteinsboi]

Definitely doable in PW. I got a lot of good suggestions from community members in the link Marty Walker posted. I'm almost done building the prototype/beta version of a similar project and so far so good