I’m looking for some suggestions in how to best setup EE in terms of weblogs, users, groups, and permissions. I’m moving an existing site (I’ll talk more about that in a minute) from a file-based system to EE, and need to rethink how to best accommodate my users who will have the ability to make changes to it. Instead of banging my head against the wall and wasting hours with trial and error, I was hoping the community here could share their knowledge, save me a few headaches, and give me some advice as to how best structure a new EE site based on our existing site.
In a nutshell, we have a site which is fairly simple, updated only a few times per week, and not a blog (at least not in the traditional sense). It’s composed of a handful of departments and individual user pages. As super admin, I will control the home page which will have some static content (Welcome to our site…) as well as pull information from other areas of the site. I will also have a couple of other users who will need access to change some of the content on the home page. I have a group of users who will need access to specific departments in the site. For example, these users will need the ability to edit the content of administrative department pages but not the finance department pages. Finally I’ll have a few dozen users who will only need to edit their own ‘personal’ pages. I’d like to have an intuitive URL structure so that the URLs will be along the lines of http://www.example.com/administrative/ and www.example.com/finance/ for the departments, and http://www.example.com/people/abc/ where abc is the initials or name of the personal page for a user. Again, some users will have both personal pages and need the ability to work on the pages in the departmental areas. The entire site should have a consistent look, however we’re thinking of possibly giving the users the ability to select from different themes or styles although this is probably the lowest on the priority list.
One point I’m getting stuck on is how users that only have personal pages will be able to structure their own areas. Aside from a “people” template group, would I want to create a new template every time any one of the users wanted to setup a special page, and wouldn’t that also make the template show up in all the other user’s URLs? For example, if a user wanted a special page to show conference photos at their personal URL http://www.example.com/people/abc/conference/ how would that be setup, and would it also show up for user xyz at http://www.example.com/people/xyz/conference/? Would the Pages tab be the answer? Is it better to setup EE with one generic user template so that when the URL of http://www.example.com/people/abc/ is passed EE knows to only pull data for user abc, and would some conditional coding be needed to lookup the user? Or, instead of one template group and a generic user template, is it better to create one template group per user? We don’t have a lot of user turnover so setting up individual user template groups wouldn’t be a management headache.
My original thought for both users and departments was to maintain multiple weblogs, one for each department and user. I also was thinking of creating one user group for each user, that way I could have fine grained control over what each person does. Then after speaking with Lisa, she enlightened me in that this probably wouldn’t be the best way to use EE and that consolidating things would be better. I’m totally open to that; I’m just not sure how to best implement it. One thing I need help with is how to set up user groups to access weblogs so that the users only see their own areas, and in such a way that the data can be separated on the public side. For example, if user abc enters content for the administrative department into a single “department” weblog, and user xyz enters content for the finance department also into the “department” weblog, how is the data kept separate on the public side? Categories?
What would be the best way to handle users that need access to managing departmental pages in addition to their own personal pages? Would a separate group need to be created for each department where a person that needed to manage it also needed to access their own personal pages? Using the example of an administrative and finance department, would I want to create two groups, one that had access to the administrative department weblog and the personal weblog, and another group that had access to the finance department and personal weblog?
Lisa also mentioned that the users won’t need access to the templates area when they are editing their content. This makes sense since once I create the look of the site and define the templates the content will automatically get pulled in where needed. However, if a single weblog should be used for all the departments, how would I go about pulling out only the data for the finance department and display it at say, http://www.example.com/finance/. Again, if this is best solved by using categories, is there a way to prevent users from seeing categories that don’t pertain to them, or should one weblog per department be used (we only have about a dozen departments)?
Finally, I would like to give the users the least amount of access as possible to prevent them from doing things they shouldn’t. Aside from having access to the control panel, which publish tabs should they have access to (Publish, Edit, Templates, Communicate, Modules, Admin). Would Publish and Edit be recommended? I would guess that the user groups would only need access to the “Can delete their own weblog entries” and whatever weblogs were select in the Weblog Assignment section. At this point we’re not planning on allowing or needing, comments on anything anyone publishes.
Sorry for the long post.