Thread

Hi all-

I have a client whose site I’d like to transfer over to EE so that he can manage the content himself.
Most of the site is pretty straightforward: static content, blog, calendar, etc.

The complicated part is that he also needs to allow his audience (mostly kids K-5, plus their parents and teachers) to post samples of their song/poem writing to share.
The audience is mostly children, so he will need for the CMS to filter for profanity, provide some basic safeguards against spam, and permit kids or parents to nuke their account if necessary (or have someone nuke it for them.)
He’ll also need to limit the info he collects from members due to COPA laws.
Can the members module handle that sort of customization?
Is there something that would work better”?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

It depends on how you’re going about the submission of such postings - are they entries? Or comments?  Will the child or parent have access to the control panel (i would think not, but it was worth asking)?

You can certainly use captcha and other controls to limit spam.  And comments and entries can each be designed with a workflow to require approval for the posting to show up, so you can initiate a level of “appropriate use” filtering that way without too much trouble.  I’m not too sure about real-time profanity screening - there are probably some simple ways to implement basic screening - disallowing certain words, for example, but with spacing, letter substitution and the like, nothing is going to be as effective as an editor/proofer reviewing the material before it’s visible to anyone else, so an approval workflow might still be your best option there.

It sounds like what you’re looking to do would certainly be possible with EE, you’d just have to plan it out thoroughly and possibly use a couple of add-ons to make life a little easier.

Thanks for the reply, John.

I was thinking of the postings being entries, but perhaps comments would work.
That would also allow an admin to create a Channel entry per school (most of the participation is organized by schools that my client performs/speaks at.)
Then the children could post comments as users, rather than full-fledged entries.
I chew on this and discuss it with the client.

And I’m sure I’ll be over here asking for help again in the near future!

You can certainly handle it with entries.  The CP though would be overwhelming to most, so a standalone entry form would work.  SafeCracker from Barrett Newton would help you with that.  And then you can still use captcha, etc. while also putting entry approval control in place using custom statuses.  There’s a great add-on for EE1 for really adding a ton of workflow to EE but it’s not yet available for EE2 - I’m sure it’s coming, but not available yet.  Best of luck! Sounds like a big project.