How to go about a user-managed database?

I was trying to make a database site with Drupal earlier today and ended up wrestling with Drupal errors for hours... and hours. While Drupal is very capable, it seems to wig out and throw errors at me at every other turn. Not to mention it runs considerably slower than modx, in my experience.

I’m wondering... is there a way I can do the following in ModX without too much struggling? (mainly, mimicking CCK & Views style functionality)

-Create a custom input form that saves to my database. Fields need to include text, check boxes, and radio buttons

-Database needs to be search able, tagged, and sortable

-Privileged users need to be able to edit table entries at will

-I need to create FIELD-LEVEL permissions. (ie: passwords or other company data would not be displayed to unprivileged users)

All of this was fairly easy to set up in Drupal, but Drupal itself is annoying the crap out of me. If ModX can do this, I’d happily use it instead.

Any insight is greatly appreciated!

-Kayle

It can be done easily enough; either in the "standard" way using snippets and forms (eForm is a natural for this), or with AJAX. This is presuming you mean from the front-end.

I have a set of articles on doing something very close to this using extjs. It doesn’t allow editing the tables, but with extjs that’s just a matter of changing some settings and adding the insert/update queries to the processing php.

http://www.sottwell.com/article-extjs1.html

CCK is really really useful, but yeah... Drupal is like Cro-magnon man when it comes to UI and templates (in my opinion -- no flames, please).

Actually, I’m working on a project that attempts to solve EXACTLY this problem, similar to the dbEdit module someone is developing now (search the forum for this term). My code isn’t totally production ready, but if you’d like to take a look at it, it may solve your problem and help me to test/streamline my code. It’s essentially a miniature MVC framework and template engine designed to tie into custom data models.

that sounds exciting. I’d like to test that too if that’s ok.
I was thinking of either extending modx to do that kind of stuff or building from ground up with kohana, so it’s great to know that people are already working on this kind of stuff.

Yeah, this framework follows a lot of patterns from CodeIgniter (as does Kohana), so it should be familiar to you. I’ll put together a file and send it to you via a private message. Please contact me privately if you’d like to see this... the docs are somewhat limited, but I’ll have some examples in place for viewing. CCK has given a lot of ideas re content types...