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Hi everyone,

Can anyone offer me any suggestions as to the best way to do this ...

I am creating a site for a client to which companies sign up to. So basically the company completes a form on the website containing all of their details. An email is sent to them confirming their submission and an email is sent to the admin of the site to say a form has been submitted. The site admin then logs into the site to accept or deny the membership and apply a membership status to the company. Based on whichever status the admin chooses an email is then sent to the company telling them they have been accepted/denied.

Now the main issue I am having is I don’t know whether it is best to use the membership module to hold each companies information or hold it all in a weblog. The reason being as well as each company being able to log in to the site individually to download any materials relevant to them I also want to display the list of signed up companies publicly on a page of the site pulled from wherever the info is being stored (I don’t want the client to have to copy of the information themselves into a separate weblog to display it on the site) so when they register they need to be able to upload their own logo. This is really where I was getting most confused. Would I just get them to upload their logo as an avatar and display that? And is there a way in ee to have emails sent out when status’s are changed?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Steve.

Hi Steve,

I would first try to implement this with the companies as members. You would need a way for them to easily edit their profile, so I would recommend an add-on like the User Module from Solspace. Companies would register as members and have their account set to the Pending member group. After admin approval the member group is changed to active and then they can log in and edit their profile. For the company logo I’d probably have them use the Memher Photo but the avatar should work, too.  Using the Solspace User Module the profile templates would just be regular ExpressionEngine templates.

The Solspace User module also does invitations. So you could send an invitation to the company (by email) to join the site and then they use the special code to create an account. After the account is successfully created you can have the module send out a welcome email: http://www.solspace.com/docs/detail/user_control_panel/#welcome_email. I haven’t used that functionality before so I don’t know the ins and outs of when the email is triggered.

(Alternatively, you could look into Profile:Edit: http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/profileedit which mixes Members and Channel Entries together.)

Hope that helps!

Hi Ryan,

Thanks a lot for the advice. I will go and take a look at these two options now. Do you know if either of these would allow for an email to be sent upon the member group being changed?

Thanks again, Steve.

Steve,

If you use the Pending status built in to EE you can notify the members when the status has changed from Pending to active. See the docs here: http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/cp/members/activate_pending_members.html

Cheers!

-Ryan

Hi Ryan,

Sorry for the slow response on this. Thanks for the advice. I have looked into these options but the bit I am still getting stuck on is how to automate the sending of emails once a member group is changed. For example, I know I can use as you said above the activate pending members for that part. This will then move them into a ‘Level 1’ status. Yet they can still be moved up from that into a ‘Level 2’ status, and they can also be moved straight from ‘Pending’ upto a ‘Level 2’ status. I have also looked at MX Notify Control for this both using the member module and through the weblog way of doing it. It actually looked promising doing it through a weblog to store ‘members’ information apart from you can not dynamically generate the ‘To’ email address so I was stumped there.

Any more ideas? Sorry for being a pain!

Steve.

Steve, you might have to do something custom with an extension to trigger the email notifications. I have only done that with custom code but there might be an existing add-on solution out there. Unfortunately, I don’t one off hand.