Thread

Hello,

Firstly please excuse my ignorance - I’m new to EE coming from other CM systems.

I have inherited a site based on EE (commercial licence) at a company I have just started working for.  The site mainly consists of “static” pages with the Pages module although also has one more blog type section for a news feed.  Currently its acting as the companies corporate website.

I have been asked to look into adding a “customer section” to this site where:

- Login/Password shown on home page
- Once logged in, customer essentially gets a personalised page that really just consists of a list of downloads (manuals, software etc)

Sounds pretty simple.

I’m trying to avoid switching the entire site to a CMS I have experience in because a) they have paid for EE already and b) EE looks like it should be more than capable of doing this.

We also have licences for a few commercial modules:

Wygwam, NavEE, Assets

I figure this should be quite a basic task.  Basically I would like to be able to upload assets, somehow tag them with “customer names” and when that customer logs in, present a list of assets to them that are tagged with their tag (not all downloads should be shown to all users).

If anyone could provide any guidance (any modules do this? could the “member” module be used?) I would be most appreciative.

EE is a very powerful and flexible system, so as you become more familiar with it, you’ll suspect feel even more confident that it can handle whatever you throw at it. Welcome to the community!  Be sure to keep an eye on the #eecms tag on twitter for more support from a great bunch of people.

To answer your questions - generally the member module can get you most of the way there, yes (though honestly, sometimes third party add-ons that convert member handling to entries can feel a bit more flexible, but that’s a separate discussion).  Then, in terms of assigning certain downloads to certain users to limit what each logged in member sees, there are a variety of options.  If downloads are one to one, a native way you can handle it is to set the author of the download posting to the user account of the person you want to have access to it.  It’s a a bit of a cheat, however, and doesn’t work if you need a single download posting to be visible to multiple users.

The more practical way I have found to handle it is using an add-on called Entry Access - it adds a tab to the publish screen that then gives you the ability to assign access rights to the entry on the basis of user group or even user specifically - which I think is far more in keeping with what you have in mind. And it doesn’t change much in your template - you just wrap the returned entries within the loop with the Entry Access tag pair to limit the returned entries to those the logged in user is permitted to see.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for your response.

Yes I do agree - there is a lot of scope in EE compared to other CMS systems.

I actually this http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/client-downloads module that seems to do what I am after but as you point out there are multiple ways of doing this so I will see how I go.

I like the look of that add-on - not one I’ve used before. It appears to be limited in scope to asset files - which is good if that’s all you’re after. I tend to have asset files as part of entries as well, and so for me, entry permissions come into play as well, which is why I’ve gone that route before, with both Entry Access and Zoo Visitor before.

All the best!

I used the client-downloads module in the past and it worked very easily. Set up was straight-forward and the interface for the client was too.  However, I have not been able to get it to work on the latest update for EE.

I too would welcome some alternatives to avoid having to move several clients who require this functionality without using FTP to another CMS.