The project I’m working on involves two parts:
1. Creating a large number of members with control panel access / posting authority, with which they
2. Edit two specific fields within a specific channel entry.
Works like this: I enter my user credentials and am presented with a list of applicants. This is list is just a table view displaying all the entries in the ‘applicants’ channel, including some basic details about them. My task (from #2 above) is, first, to rank them numerically (1 to 5) and, second, to add comments about each applicant. Each of the applicants has these two fields—‘rank’ and ‘comments’—but they are blank until someone like me comes along and edits them.
Now, this all happens through a public-facing template: that is, not through the control panel. What I’ve got right now is a disaster: I’m including a hugely expensive and slow {exp:safecracker} call for each of the entries (about 100). My ideal solution would be to include a text area for comments and a drop down for ranking, allow the user to make all their rankings and comments, then click a single ‘submit’ at the bottom that then writes the data to the custom field of the corresponding entry (each applicant is an entry in channel ‘applicants’).
Is there some easy / obvious way to approach this? Maybe not use SafeCracker at all, just grab all the POST input and write to the channel_data table directly with a SQL query? Can anyone direct me to a thread in the fora describing best practices for editing channel entries not through the control panel?
Any advice or suggestions would be much obliged. Thanks!