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I am a php developer with about 3 years experience but i have not as yet customized a CMS. I am looking at several CMS both open source and paid commercial for the project. I have been asked to customize a CMS of my choice. Here is what i need to be able to do.

1.All accounts to be searchable in a central pool

2.For individuals to be able to sign up/login/edit there profiles.

3.For company’s to sign up / login and then add users/delete (those mentioned in point 2), which they can manage ( these users are visible in the central search).

4)Companys would have access to different faculties based on what type of a company they are and what privileges that would give them.

5)A front page which displays the profiles of users, which can then be clicked on and viewed.

6)Would there be a problem displaying randomized records on the front page.

MORE QUESTIONS

7)Do i access to the source code ?

8)Do i have The ability to add custom records to profiles ?

9)Can the CMS handle a large numbers of concurrent users ?

10)Is the CMS logically laid out, commented and documents ?

11)Has the CMS been designed to be extended and enhanced with external programmers in mind?

12)Is the CMS genuinely extensible and not limiting ?

Good morning =)

ExpressionEngine has a robust membership system - members can be searched for (You can go to our Member List and scroll to the bottom to see the search) and members can be placed into membership groups so that they can be given permissions based on group.  In your scenario I would envisage that a group would be the company the member belongs to.  You might need two groups per company - “Company Admin” and “Company Members”.  Please note that a member can only belong to one group at a time.

You can set access on templates, or use conditionals to restrict portions within a template to the appropriate member groups.

For displaying randomized member records on the front page would require a MySQL query.

—More Questions—

7)  Yes, the source is open, though the licensing obviously isn’t. =)  You may modify the source as well, and you may describe such modifications, but you may not distribute those files.

8)  You can set up custom profile fields.

9) ExpressionEngine can, yes, most of this is going to be dependent on your server and hardware setup and optimization for a dynamic environment.

10) Yes, of course. =)

11) Absolutely, we have a robust API that can be used to create Modules, Extensions, and Plugins.  Please check out our development documentation

12)  Like anything, there are certainly limits and areas that could use expanding - but ExpressionEngine is extremely flexible and powerful, even without any programming knowledge, and so with the expandability as mentioned in point 11, there is a huge amount that you can do using ExpressionEngine as a framework.

We always recommend you try before you buy - for the membership stuff you’re going to need the hosted demo, but you can have a look at Core to see the source for some of the software and to see how it is laid out, and commented.

Please post back if you have any other questions!

I would need the individuals to be members of multiple companies as people may work for 2 or more companies. how would you advise that i approach this problem?

Would it be possible to have pictures displayed as results for the profile search?

is it possible to discuss my needs web site by telephone or live chat as i would like to get a direction on how to approach my project ?

Greetings—

If you needed those employees in multiple companies only for the front-end viewing of information (and not administration in the back-end), then solspace.com has a Permission module which allows you to place a User in multiple “permission points”.  You can even create an administrative permission point with allowances to grant access to other points - all done in the templates.  It’s currently offline after some bugs were found, but you might like to head over to solspace.com’s forums to see what’s going on there.  That is how I would proceed with that particular need.

It would depend how you stored those pictures - it would certainly be possible, but it may need some custom work with queries.  It’s hard to say without knowing how you envisage storing those pictures.

You are certainly welcome to send more detailed project requirements to sales and we’ll be happy to address them in more detail there.  Since a lot is addressed in this thread it would be great to link to it so that we have some background.

Thank you!