Thread

I’ve been playing with EE for a few weeks off and on since I purchased it, and I’m getting discouraged because I don’t yet seem to ‘get the system’.

I wanted to do something pretty “simple” but can’t get my head around how to start or tie it together. Here’s what I’m looking to do:

1. Website > Description Content areas (or “blogs”) on front page
2. Visitor sees website and chooses which area to access, for example, blog 1, blog 2, blog 3 (really a combo of blogs 1 and 2)
3. Visitor chooses blog 1, lands on blog 1 page login form
4. Visitor logs into blog 1 and can read and comment on blog 1 posts
5. If log in incorrect, go to a page that says “log in incorrect, help with password or email admin for assistance”

This is the crux of what I’m trying to accomplish, which I thought was straightforward to set up. Maybe it’s due to me being sleep deprived for 8 months (have baby) but I have read descriptions in the user manual and some part so the wikis, yet I still don’t know to “start” at the beginning and create what’s needed for steps 1-5. The most I’ve gotten done is porting my site design onto the templates.

I’m at the point where I’m considering putting this job on elance. I wonder if I’m thinking too complicated and if I get some “for dummies” directions I’ll get it. I thought pmachine had a learning curve but I understood how to use the templating/membership functions pretty quickly.

I know EE learning curve is steep, but didn’t anticipate it so steep that my ultimate “cost” is license + hiring someone to do what I thought EE’s intuitiveness could help me set up by myself.

Plurky

I’ll probably shift this to ‘How to’ as it’s a bit on the general side.  And… I’m going to ask a question that I think we’ll probably be better of ignoring once we get the answer.  I think the best thing to do is get the site up, working, dynamic- and ignore the login requirement for the moment.

BUT- for this login to view- once they are logged in, can they view all content?  Or are you wanting different logins for blog1 and blog2.  First is easy.  Second, not as much.

Robin,

I have been creating weblogs on the backend and populating db with data. In terms of log-in, I can do 1 login for both blogs, but thought member groups function should be able to handle assigning the logged in member to see only the area he or she is assigned to. So if I create member group “blog 1” and “blog 2”, a member in “blog 2” would see blog 2 and not blog 1, right?

Thank you!

You can do it, it just gets more complicated.  So- how do you assign them to a blog/blogs?  At registration?  What you’d want to do, create a member group for each permission grouping you need.  Say- you have 2 weblogs.  You might need up to 3 member groups - one with permission to view blog1, one with permission to view blog2 and one with permission to view both.  For an example.

Then- you create conditionals based on those member groups.  One way to do this is via access restrictions.  Probably not the way I’d go here, but it’s an option.  If they aren’t in the proper member group, they’re redirected to a different page- where you could have a login and/or a message that they don’t have permission to view.  Keep in mind- if they are logged in and only allowed to view blogb and trying to view bloga- logging in won’t help them.  So I might have a conditional message- ‘your member group is not allowed to view this page’- and if they aren’t logged in- show the login form.

An alternative to access restrictions is the use of conditional global variables- so they can view the template (as opposed to access restrictions) but they can only see certain content if they meet the condition- such as being in certain member groups.

Having three different groups w/varying levels of access just makes the conditional logic more complicated.  And there’s also the issue of how to assign them to their proper group (easy enough if you do it manually, but if you want to automate it, it’s more complicated.)  It’s still doable, and with only 2 groups simple.  But say you get 5 different blogs and you want member groups for all possible combination- still doable, but the logic gets geometrically more complicated.

Make sense?

The registration and access assignment will be 100% manual (i.e. may require sign-up contracts with the end-user), which means the assignment to proper member group will not be the issue.

The main issue is “what is logical templating approach” for my site. i.e. like you said, different pages for different groups? Same template group for all members but using conditional variables so certain members see certain content areas?

I’m open to either approach, and whatever is easiest for my dull brain is what I’ll go with.

After consulting with a colleague, I’m going to keep my life simple and just go with one membership area. In other words, if you can log in, you can see content. If you don’t know the log in, you don’t see the content.

Does this mean what I need to do now is the following:
1) create a log in form
2) create the index listing of all available articles
3) create the “full text” page like pmachine’s “more” function

You’ll want to use {exp:member:login_form} for that. As to the rest, yes, that sounds rather straight forward.

All right, I think to save my sanity at this point, I should get professional intervention to help me do this even if the job appear laughably simple.

Do I post on the job board, or is this so simple that I should give up on EE for yet another week and try coming back to it?

Plurky, adding a login page or code snippet is fairly easy to do.

Login Form

The link above gives you a form you can cut and paste and add to your template.

I make one change to that form, and that is swap out the following:

return="site/index"

to

return="{segment_1}/{segment)2}/{segment_3}"

This way, no matter where that form is at, they’re return to the *current* templategroup/template that you started with. I use {segment_3} just in case the form is on something like a comment page or the like.

Does that help?

Expression Engine is hard to learn, in my opinion, but once you start getting it, you start getting it.

I’d suggest you give it another try and keep at it.  I’m new to the software, but have to do it since we already started and the client is waiting.  I did, however, have someone who had used it a lot before run through everything very generally and breifly for me, so that helped.

Really, my advice, newbie to newbie, is to make sure you understand the basics of how everything works.

Key things to make sure you understand (and if you don’t after reading around, make a thread):

1) Weblogs
2) Templates
3) Field Groups
4) Categories (and Category Groups)
5) Pages Module

Once you have those totally understood, you can start piecing together your site and then learning more details about how EE works.

I’ve only been using EE for about 2 or 3 weeks but consider myself much more comfortable with it than before.  I’m actually at the point of using AJAX and custom SQL queries to finish off the site’s components that aren’t standard in EE.

So, I’d like to just give you this encouragement.  Yes, it is hard!  BUT, if you are a developer, and you reference the documentation and forms, you WILL get it, even if it takes some time.  I’ve search the forums for hours since I first began and posted some 30 threads of questions… so expect to do some more homework until you are comfortable.

Maybe EE could have a Newbie section just to get people started a little bit easier.  They might have one already, but I didn’t see it so I did it the hard way and search around and asked silly questions 😊

Keep trying, the support here is really great but you have to put your effort in as well.

Thank you for the encouragement; I totally agree with you re: the support and response time!

I’d love a newbie section. It may save the support team answering newbie q’s repeatedly as well, although I try to do forum/wiki/user guide search before posting.

I’ll keep trying.

EEBeginner:// Video: HowTo Add a Login form to your site