Advice for new user

[manlio]

Hi to everybody, I'm new to Processwire and I'm really amazed by this CMS and framework. So thanks for this wonderful work!

I need to build a website with some instructors (400 hundreds more or less and I don't need registration). Every instructor after login should be able to publish courses, request certification cards and edit his personal profile using a really simple interface and obviously all these features should be in a reserved area.

I have read a lot of posts on the forum but I'm too new to this CMS and PHP to choose the best way to approach this.

I would like to know if the best choice is to change and modify the backend to meet my requirements or if I need to build a specific front end for users (custom login,ecc...)

From what I understand if I go on the front end route I need to rebuild all manage interface like drag and drop reordering, crud, ecc... (maybe I'm wrong).

I would like to fasten the development as much as possible without rebuilding something that is still working in the backend.

Just as an additional info, I'm more on a designer point of view but I can script some code (I have also a coder that can help me).

Thank you for your help and have a nice day.

[Ivan Gretsky]

I think, you are right - you will have to rebuild everything in the front-end. Maybe not from scratch, but from some UI library like JQuery UI or YUI. And if you are new to ProcessWire and PHP it might be some hard way to take. Though it is possible to do, I would advise to take a look at some out-of-the-box systems like Moodle before making a decision.

[manlio]

Thank you Ivan for the quick reply and thanks for the link to moodle, but in reality I don't need such a specialized platform. I try to give some more details to clarify better. I only need that instructors can publish courses (composed by really few fields like "place", "start date", "end date", "description", ... nothing complicated) and they should be visible on a public page.

Then I need that instructors are able to update their personal photo and data. And the last part is to request certification cards that are totally independent from all the previous things. My coder could develop this last feature by his own.

My front end is based on Bootstrap and so maybe I could use Jquery UI or something specific like Fuel UX.

From what I have read I think it is possible to manage all these things through processwire API in the front end but I was really amazed by this post https://processwire.com/talk/topic/6135-dreitagewochede/ where I see a really simplified backend. Is this possible in actual version and how?

My deadline is not so strict so I have enough time to learn more on processwire and raise my PHP skill (now I'm able to write something and modifying existing script to my needs). Thank you again!

[LostKobrakai]

The backend, which is shown in your linked post, is very much custom made. The styling comes from a admin theme, which you can find here in the forum or via the module search, but the information shown by the interface are served by a custom module. If you have the time to develop those, you can build the backend to be exactly what you want it to be, just search for "process modules" for more information. These are the ones used by admin pages. Even the core backend consists of those. So processwire can do, what you intend to build, but you need to build it by yourself or together with your coder. 

[Ivan Gretsky]

You still could go the frontend way and make use of Form Builder to implement cource publishing feature and maybe profile upgrades as well. If you want to go the backend way follow kongondo's googling advice in this topic or +1 on the tutorial request in there .

[manlio]

Ok, now everything is more clear to me.

Thanks both for your time. This is really a friendly forum. I'll try to plan the best strategy for me.

Probably I will post very soon for other questions

Have a nice day