Community site, what to do with the users?

Hi all,

I’m working on a community based graphics website on which (registered) artists can publish images for others to use. This will be free to start with, but in the future I might consider adding a "premium" category for those that are willing to pay a small sum for something custom made, which then goes to the artist.

Anyhow, I’ve decided to use MODx Revo for this as one of my colleagues has been stressing how much he likes that over evo when making custom apps... and I must admit from playing around a little I’m liking it also.

But now to my question. As the intention is to get a lot of users (artists and visitors alike), I’m wondering if I should use the built-in MODx user system, or to build my own and use it as a package instead. So I’m looking for a little feedback on that.

Pros for using a custom user system:
- more flexibility on how users are being presented in the backend, what fields they can/must fill in
- doesn’t fill up the modx tables with loads of records
- the users wont need access to the manager, so why give them a login for that

Cons of using a custom user system:
- requires more coding (but hey, that’s part of setting up a website right? )
- there’s already a system in place which would sort of render useless

I’m wondering what you all think. I also want to support different logins, like OpenID, Google, FB etc someday, so I’m not sure if that changes the best tactic.

I’m pretty sure that the graphics will go in a seperate table already as I’m not looking forward to having thousands of documents in the document tree. But I’m open to suggestions

(Oh, btw, I’m not sure if this is the right forum as it’s not a "How do I" but more a "How should I" question.. was doubting between this one and the general banter forum but this one won the bet. If it’s wrong please forgive me.)

I don’t do Revo, but I do understand (more or less) the principles it works with. User management is highly extensible; I would rather imagine it would be better to work with the existing system than to start over again from scratch. As far as the images go, I’m presuming that the Revo gallery uses resources as anchors for galleries. This is not necessarily required, though, since Easy 2 Gallery for Evo does not, although EvoGallery and MaxiGallery do. It might be worth examining E2G’s code to see how it works; its management is a module (as is EvoGallery).

hi Mark,

did you find a practical solution for your ’custom user system’ ?

TIA

Marc

I haven’t played with Revo’s user management system but I did do something in Evo.
In my case I choose something in the middle

The idea was to take advantage of some modx snippets that handle the login, possible the registration. In Evo I built my own registration system using eForm(because of many custom fields I ended up with 4 user tables on top of the modx ones) but for Revo it might be possible to do it with the Register snippet + User Extended fields

Here is my implementation translated to Revo
1. use Login snippet for login on the frontend
2. use FormIt for registration form (it might be possible that User Extended fields work with the Register snippet)
3. use custom tables for extra information about the user. eg department, sub-department, photo gallery etc
4. Create a CMP that allows you to manage users profile(not mandatory but helpful)

Spent a couple of months playing around with this, and then decided to not go on with it.. lol.

’t was one of those "wouldn’t it be nice to.." projects that end up nowhere.


Since then I have been working with Revolution pretty much exclusively though, and I think you could definitely use the existing security system. It is very sophisticated (has a learning curve because of that, though) and with extended fields or extending modUser (there’s a tut for that on the RTFM) you could pretty much add whatever you need.

When you think of MODX as a content management framework, and not a system, you’ll be able to do everything with it that you need

hi all,

thx very much for your relies - I did not expect that for that one-year-old thread.
8-)

the background for my question is that I need some kind of user-management to deal with hundreds or even thousands of users registering on a community-like site. I’ll only need their login to identify them and give access to their private data (and some little more).

I wonder if it’s a pretty good idea to have them all created as individual modUser-s. the management interface will not look very cool with a list of some thousand entries (and I think it is not meant to be so for this kind of task).

since my post yesterday, I read about OnWebAuthentication from modx-api.
maybe it’s a way to store each community-user in a totally separate table (or even different database) and map them to only a few different modUser-accounts (to assign some kind of different rights like moderators etc.)

what do you think ?

TIA

Marc

That’d work too. IIRC that’s the system event for Evolution tho (not sure, but think so!), so be sure to check out the Revo docs at rtfm.modx.com and the phpDocumenter docs at api.modxcms.com.


I don’t even think you would need to wrap it in a modUser, but you can just "return true;" to say the person is authed..