manager users, content types and roles/resource groups

so, i have to create a website for a school where the students can showcase their works via fotos, videos and galleries.

the idea is that each student will get their own manager user and only be able to access their own ’container’ where they can edit, create and delete single fotos, videos, foto-/videogalleries and a little bit of text.

now, i’m quite at a loss on how to implement this in modx.

these are my questions:

1) is there any such thing as ’custom content types’? like, if a student clicks on ’create resource’, he gets a list of content types (single foto, single video, fotogallery and videogallery) and depending on which one he chooses, he gets different input fields. so for a single foto it would be an input field named ’title’, one called ’description’ and a way to upload the foto from his computer. if he chooses ’fotogallery’, he gets the same fields but in the file upload dialog he can choose multiple files and after uploading them all he gets to a page where he can enter a title and description for each of the fotos.

are there any plugins for this kind of content editing/management?

2) I’ve played around a bit with roles and resource groups and a problem I’ve come across is that if I define a container ’students’ in which every studen gets his own container (e.g. ’mary’ and ’john’) and I assign each student his own resource group and each container that same resource group, it doesn’t quite work because they will need access to the ’students’ container (which holds all the subcontainers that belong to each student), which means they’ll be able to edit and delete this ’topmost’ container, which they shouldn’t. on the other hand, if each student only gets access to his own container (e.g. resource group ’mary’ only has access to container ’mary’, but not to the overall ’students’ container), then of course mary won’t see anything.

of course I could just make each student’s container a top-level one, but then the page tree will get quite messy if there’s about 30 containers plus the other static pages of the site (like contact, about, etc.)

3) basically, would it be relatively easy to accomplish a site like this without needing to heavily modify the standard modx manager, or would you have to more-or-less write a custom backend for it?

I’ve searched the forums quite a bit but didn’t really find anything that clearly answers those questions - apologies if this post is redundant

thanks

I would not use manager users for this; manager users are for well, managing the site. Use PubKitBlog, and set up Jot and MaxiGallery and all the rest to use web groups and web login. More complicated to set up, but in the long run much better.

Use WebLoginPE to manage the registration and profile activities of the students.