Greetings and solicitations...

Hello,

I must say I am very impressed so far with the quality of this package, and the coimmunity surrounding it. I have been out of the web building and development world for a few years. I recently hooked up with an old employer, got back into coding, and now the need for a web frontend for our business software has arisen. I’m hoping that MODx is the framework that will help me get things going quickly. My un-intended hiatus has left my PHP and SQL skills rather rusty. I am amazed at how far web technology has advanced.

I have a request of the community. My application is a complex manufacturing system, with a shop floor component, (dumb character terminals), and is not currently based on an SQL database. (This is real old-school stuff.) We are migrating the backend to MySQL, but the main app will still be running on dumb terminals. The shop floor is not a place for fancy workstations. What I need to do is adapt MODx to interface with our application, including some very intricate business rules. Are any other of you MODx’ers in a similar situation? Most of what we are doing is displaying lists of records, and executing various programs on selected record(s). Many times we are doing much more than just editting a record. I know that a lot of that will be in my backend code. Where I need some guidance is in setting up MODx to do the foillowing:

• Force a login to every visitor. Visitors will not be allowed to sign up.
• Menu choices are tied to individuals and groups.
• Within a screen, functions available are also limited to individuals and groups.

Oh, another question: Do I need to have my application in the same database that MODx resides in? Having them run on the same machine is not a problem, but I can’t have a situation where the application database might conflict with MODx.

Thanks in advance, and again, this is a very impressive package. I am very pleased to have discovered it.

Thanks for the kind words. This is actually probably a very good application for XPDO, which makes it easy to change your mind after the fact so to speak with your data modeling... helps to shake the rust off so to speak.

Forcing a login is no problem; just make every document but the login page a non-public group assignment. The menu builders like the new Wayfinder that was released this week should support building those menus based on the groups/permissions assignments.

For permissions within a page, you’ll probably want to use Membercheck or Personalize.

I really appreciate the quick response.

I’m still trying to get my head back around the PHP sysntax, along with this whole new world of templates and pages.

*begin Old Fart Voice*
Back in My Day, we just spit out HTML in response to a form submit. We didn’t have all this fancy-pants CSS and JavaScript. Flat files and perl CGI was good enough for us.
*end Old Fart Voice*

It’s a big new world for an old brain to get a handle on.

Sounds interesting. MODx should be the perfect framework for what you need.

As far as user access control, I wrote a fairly nice document manager package that allows certain users to only download documents, others to be able to "check out" and "check in" documents for editing, and others to add and delete documents. Other functions are available depending on whether the user is the document’s creator or not. It was a lot of fun to make. One of these days I’m going to work it over and add an Ajax front-end to it.