I need some help with a particular section of a web site I am building in EE. The section in question is here:
http://67.199.23.35/tripresources/triplogs.cfm
Each one of these is essential a blog that family members can read so they can know what is going on with their children while on these trips. As you can see they are broken down into top level categories e.g. Service Adventures, Language Adventures, Multisport Adventures, Gap Semesters. That is the first hurdle - I need to be able to sort by those categories.
Clicking on a Trip takes you to a log in. This is the second requirement. The passwords themselves are created and distributed manually via email - so I don’t have to worry about that. I just have to worry about putting the Trips behind a password. I know you can restrict user access by channel but I am not sure how to accomplish this.
Once inside, they see a really basic blog with only a few custom fields e.g. Post Title, Date, Post maybe a photo gallery. The point is, all the trips share the same custom field group.
These trips will be created all the time and ideally I don’t want the admins to go through the confusing process of creating a new channel and associating the field group etc. That would be more work than their current custom Coldfusion system that we are replacing.
So I was thinking of creating 1 channel and 1 group. Under that I could have the top level categories mentioned above. On the publish page they could choose which one to put it in.
I was thinking I could make the Trips themselves sub-categories of those top level categories. So that means the process of creating a new trip blog would involve making a new category in the backend.
The next issue is that each Trip Blog needs it’s own RSS feed so that family members can subscribe to only that feed.
Each Trip will have a publisher that will get access to the backend. You can restrict access to channels, but if I make the Trips categories, then then they will be able to see all the other Trips as well and have to choose their Trip/Category which will likely be confusing and accident prone. I don’t want them to have to do that. I just want them to log in and create a new post and have it show up in the right place.
I am looking for any kind of answers to meet these requirements. To give you an idea of how easy it is to create a Trip Log with their current system, I have attached a screen shot.
I should point out that I was planning on using Structure, but I have never used it yet. I am hoping it is a good fit.