Thread

I am developing a site for an educational institution, and would like to begin a database of “customers”.  Can that be done in a weblog, should I look at Freeform, or is there a better way?

The database should store name and contact info, it should remember the customer’s history (what they bought, when, etc; what events they participated in), what mailinglists they belong to, and probably a lot of other things I haven’s thought of yet.

I want to be able to use all of this info to generate webpages taylored to the individual.

Any suggestions out there?  Examples?  Tutorials?

Yes, to use a weblog that way is perfectly fine. I’ve done things like that, basically using one weblog entry per person and a large number of custom fields.

jvanschaijik, there are several ways you could do this.

One way is to create a weblog entry for each person. You could put in custom fields to store information in it.

Freeform is a great method for storing the results of a submitted form, but not so much for editing that entry or adding content.

What you could do is combine Freeform with the moblog, and that would give you the flexibility you need.

Then you could add/edit fields.

Does that give you any more ideas?

Thanks Ingmar and Sue,

I’m afraid I am still confused.  I don’t really know where to begin.

Let be give a concrete example:
I have a weblog with names, addresses, etc.  Now I want to keep track of the courses a particular individual follows, the talks he goes to, and other events he participates in.  If I use a weblog, wouldn’t I have to keep on adding custom fields?  And wouldn’t that lead to duplicate information (the series of courses offered being in one weblog, but correlative custom fields in the customer weblog?)

  >What you could do is combine Freeform with the moblog<

I thought the moblog was a module designed to facilitate making entries while you are away.  How would that help me?

The moblog is designed to create a weblog or gallery entry via email.

Freeform sends form content to an email address. It also allows you to set the template it uses to send the email.

You structure the Freeform fields to match your weblog fields.

As far as tracking what else that user is associated with, you could look at:

Playa