Thread

There must be a way to do this, but I am unable to find anything helpful. Let me first say that I am very new to ExpressionEngine, but am experienced with CodeIgniter if that helps. I’m making some changes to a site for a CVB (convention and visitors bureau) and they’d like to have the ability to allow some members to access only a specific channel entry.

Specifically, the site has a channel called Directory where they have various businesses within the city. In its current state, admins can add and edit new directory items. They want to allow a user / or group to edit a specific channel entry. So, this would essentially allow an owner of a business (that is listed on the site) to edit his/her entry only.

From what I can tell, the Entry Access (http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/entry-access) plugin can accomplish what I am wanting. However, there is an additional clause. If a business owner edits his/her information, is there a way to only enable that user to make an unpublished revision of that channel entry.  So, an admin can login later and approve / deny the changes.

Is any of this possible?

Generally yes, with two native EE functions in concert with one another.  (1) the user can be set as the author of the entry.  And the channel permissions can then be set to allow a user to edit only their own entry.  Mike Boyink talks about this in one of his screencasts about setting up member only functionality in EE on trainee.com. (2) in concert with this, you would also want to grant that directory user group to only have access to a custom status that you set up of something like pending.  Then when they make a change, the status of the entry can only be set to pending.  Coupled with entry notifications, your admin would be notified of a change to the entry.

The downside to this native approach is that with this model, the client changing the entry and setting it to pending would remove the entry from the site (making the assumption here that only the default “open” status will be visible).  Natively, there is no “versioning” of the entry in the visible sense.  For that higher functionality, an add-on like Better Workflow is a good option.  Then the live entry is left alone with a draft edit copy of the entry is made and awaiting approval before your admin makes it the live entry.

Hope that helps.