Not really a pre-sales question per se, since I’ve used Expression Engine now on several successful projects.
However, I am wondering if the functionality I am going to describe could be pulled off by creating a custom extension. I just thought I’d ask EE developers themselves before bugging the folks in the Developer discussion forum.
I’m going to be redoing a site for a youth volunteer coordination nonprofit agency. Their site will allow youth to register and log in, and the youth members can search for listings of volunteer opportunities that NGO agencies will also be adding to the site. This, I know for a fact, EE can easily handle.
Searching isn’t so much of a problem, but what I am wondering is, with the help of an extension, could EE conceivably do the following:
1) Once the visitors log in, filter the list of the opportunities that organizations post so that the youth members only see ones that match their interests… perhaps through comparing “keyword” fields.
2) If, when new opportunities are posted that match a youth site member’s interests in his or her profile, they can be automatically emailed. In other words, something like the basic functionality of monster.com (or even lavalife.com): your profile is matched with records in another blog.
I recognize that the member templates have different functionalities than ordinary weblogs. That is OK. Perhaps, once logged in, each user could create an entry in an “interests” weblog and that is what would be matched to entries in the ‘volunteer opportunity’ weblog.
Again, I know this isn’t out-of-the-box functionality for EE, but I simply wondering if automatic behind-the-scenes search-and-matches, and emailing, are completely impossible.
Please let me know if any of this isn’t explained well and I’ll try to describe what I’m trying to do in more detail. As always, thanks for a wonderful product, folks!
R o B