Hi,

I am hoping that User and User Authors may be the solution I am looking for.

Basically I need to be able to register a large number (hundreds or thousands) of members , who will be employees of one of a largish number (50-100) of client organisations .

On logging in , a member will be directed to a page which shows weblog entries which their organisation is allowed to view.

I need an easy way to assign entries on publication to a particular organisation, or failing that to its individual employees.

Does this make sense, and have I found the solution?

Yes, this would definately work for this application.

How many entries do you think you will have? I ask because it might be a bit of a daunting task to assign a couple thousand people over and over again to entries, etc… but it all depends on how many, and how much time you’re willing to put in… but definately possibe

An alternative to this might be the User Categories option. Basically, it allows you to assign Users to categories. You could then submit your entries to those same Weblog categories, and have the page dynamically pull up entries for that category only…

The categories part is theoretical though… I have not tested this… although, if it’s something you’re considering, let me know, and I’ll put it to the test

Thanks, Pie Man.

The site owner wants to give each of their clients (say 100 organisations) their own page, which they will be directed to on login. This will contain a bit of welcome text (a single entry from a ‘client greeting’ weblog) and a list of entries (say 20), from another ‘articles’ weblog, containing maybe 200 entries total).

The site owner needs to be able to register probably between one and twenty members for each client organisation, and all these members need to see just their organisation’s content. So on their customised homepage, they see their welcome message and the articles which have been assigned to their organisation. No other organisation will see that same welcome message, but articles are shared in different overlapping combinations.

All the ongoing management will be done by the site owner, so needs to be fairly straightforward.

Hope this makes sense.

Zack,

I’m currently testing this out… I shouldn’t be too much longer… sometime tomorrow (Friday).

Thanks for being patient

Thank you. It just occurred to me that maybe the way to handle the articles would be to have them as related entries, so they do not each need specific permissions, but are just selected when each organisation’s ‘welcome, entry is published. I hope that makes things more straightforward.

That’s a clever idea,

However, you say that some articles will overlap each other, and I don’t believe you can assign more than one entry as related…

I’m still working on this Category option… I truly believe it will be the best and easiest way… I think that one of the variable pairs is not working correctly at the moment though.

Thanks again for being patient

I can have 20 relationship fields in the welcome weblog, allowing the site owner to link to this number of articles for each client organisation. It doesn’t matter how many welcome entries link in this way to each article, does it?

I was thinking that if you wanted to go this route, you’d create your 20 main entries, assign all staff of that company to that entry as “authors”.

Then, create your....  ahh… I see… then have 20 or so related dropdowns where you could assign from that entry. That could work too… but I wonder how messy that could get. (I was invisioning the other way around).

You would need to add like 20 of these then:

Assigning all staff is the bit that I would like to work around. I don’t think the site owner will find this intuitive - they won’t remember what organisation every member belongs to.

It seems to me that what I REALLY need is the ability to assign members to categories, and have those categories reflected in the publish form. They would need to be updatable and ideally keep in synch automatically.

Does this sound possible?

zackmorgan - 14 March 2008 09:38 AM

Assigning all staff is the bit that I would like to work around. I don’t think the site owner will find this intuitive - they won’t remember what organisation every member belongs to.

It seems to me that what I REALLY need is the ability to assign members to categories, and have those categories reflected in the publish form. They would need to be updatable and ideally keep in synch automatically.

Does this sound possible?

Haha, that’s what I was thinking… it’s clean and simple… it just seems that one of the functions is not behaving correctly, so I’m trying to get this fixed right away so I can proceed with the testing

I should know in a couple of hours

Alright, thanks for waiting on me

Got the User Categories variables parsing correctly now…

So, in theory this can be done. Your only hurdle will be passing the Category ID to the category= parameter in the Weblog:Entries loop.
It will require some custom PHP/SQL coding to get done though.

However, this type of idea for usage was the main vision of the User Categories feature, and we will have a built-in feature for this in the future.

I can suggest a couple workarounds though…

1. You can have the user log into they account, then have a link that will be generated by the User Category variables, which can build a “naitve” EE URL structure of:

yoursite.com/template_group/template/C14/

And will display properly. This might or might not be a good choice for you… in the scenario that you planned to have a page before veing the entries.

2. Better yet, you could hide those variables in a redirect and it avoids the above

Ok thanks - I guess with custom coding anything can be done! I hope not to use the category urls, though - I really need each user’s organisation’s page to appear at the same .com/clients url.
There is no ‘page before viewing the entries’ btw. They should log in and go straight to the single entry and its related entries.

I am not clear about the user categories feature as I don’t see anything in the docs about this. Is there any info you can direct me to? And any idea on when the next version will be available?

Anyway I expect I’ll be using these add-ons for an upcoming project as they have other features I need. But it would be great if they could solve this particular issue as I don’t see anything else out there that does it.

Zack,

It’s a little hard to find the documentation on it because it’s function is just as a variable pair… so it’s included with the User Edit and User Stats loops.

User Edit: http://www.solspace.com/docs/entry/user_12_edit/#categories
User Stats (Profile): http://www.solspace.com/docs/entry/user_12_stats/#categories

As far as expected date… I cannot give you a firm timeline… but maybe within a month or so.

...The User Categories option. Basically, it allows you to assign Users to categories. You could then submit your entries to those same Weblog categories, and have the page dynamically pull up entries for that category only…

The categories part is theoretical though… I have not tested this… although, if it’s something you’re considering, let me know, and I’ll put it to the test.

I am VERY interested in this option. As a matter of fact, it would be the answer to my EE dreams! Is it available now? Is there any more information?

seajay,

Yes, it is available… sort of
You can assigned members to Categories, but we currently haven’t gotten it to work for dynamically filtering content per user, based on Category

It seems the Category Assignment on registration does not work for now though.
It still works for User:Edit and User:Stats.

The current issues are that the {categories}{/categories} variable pair Mitchell was able to duplicate for User Module can only be used once per template.
Secondly, it seems conditionals on the User Category feature do not work yet. We also have to figure out a way to pass that Category ID to the Weblog:Entries loop…

Although this feature is really only in it’s infancy stage, I can assure you this feature is on the top of our lists for the User Module.
I’ll keep you guys updated