is this possible?

i have an idea for a site that would involve posting items that get rated by site members. i’m not sure whether the items would be posted by admins & power users (more likely at this point) or site members. would it be possible to do the following:

- restrict membership to people with verified emails? i think i’d like to avoid having spurious membership. having something like this being automated would be ideal, but i can understand if it’s not possible yet (or not possible due to my own lack of knowledge).
- provide members to have the ability to do the 5 star rating thing on items. the items themselves would have different categories to rate, so an overall rating followed by a breakdown of the ratings of a few categories.
- post a survey for new members to answer, possibly with some answers contributing to the rating of an item. or have a survey involved for rating an item, with survey answers contributing to 5 star ratings.

this may well be beyond my abilities, and perhaps i’d need to hire some help for this. any tips at all would be appreciated.


arp

Yes, this is all possible within MODx. Depending on your exact requirements some custom code might be needed but otherwise everything else could be done between Ditto, CSS Star Rater, and NewsPublisher.

that is good news - so the learning curve continues! this would be a travel site. if any programmer wants to hit me up off-list, i’d be happy to discuss things further. there are aspects of the following sites that i’d like to emulate as well: http://www.travelpost.com/ , http://www.zoomandgo.com/default.asp and http://www.tripadvisor.com/ .

Very nice sites! (esp. the first one) Would be a nice project to do that with MODx.
Keep me tuned, just in case I could help

yah - that first one is more Web 2 than the others. lemme find a developer and we’ll see how we try to accomplish this. i’d love to use modx, but i’m open to whatever works.

Quote from: arphaus at Jul 28, 2006, 08:10 PM

yah - that first one is more Web 2 than the others. lemme find a developer and we’ll see how we try to accomplish this. i’d love to use modx, but i’m open to whatever works.

Would be good to know what should happen in the background: User-Roles, permissions, workflows and all that.
You can’t beat MODx in creating a real cool front-end, but when it comes to the "backstage" it might look different, depending on your requirements.

i haven’t sussed it all out - i only got the idea in the middle of the night

after further consideration, involving a couple of other sites i have ideas for, here’s a list of functions that i’d like. perhaps not all for one site, but i’d like solutions to be usable on more than one site (i guess like custom plugins):

01-ecommerce, to sell stuff. currently, i’m thinking of using the viewport with something like zen cart or oscommerce. with ratings & truncated reviews from customers.
02-verified email registration for customers.
03-the product ratings would be based on a survey, resulting in the 5 star action. would also limit to 1 review per item per customer, with future updates possible
04-automatic creation of a personal page for a customer, with an as-yet-undetermined level of customization (perhaps a little blog, picture upload, the full text of their reviews).
05-the reviews would require some level of cooperation between modx & the ecommerce app - the user logins for both should be identical, so when someone reviews a product, it’s connected to their personal page. the product page would have a truncated review with a ’click here to read more’ for the full review, perhaps simply to an anchor on the personal page to the review.
06-would be cool if the reviews could have pictures connected to them
07-one group of products should have anonymous reviews - ie, the customers can make reviews but their usernames are not connected in any way.
08-2nd user group: the companies behind the products. separate login and a profile page for them & their products (with customer product ratings?), also linked to from the individual products (perhaps with something like greybox for just the company info on the product pages)
09-come to think of it, i’d love to use greybox for any photo galleries involved. dunno if that can be an automated part of the system (ie user uploads pictures, they automagically end up in a greybox gallery)
10-some of the sites i’ve seen have user video uploads, which would be cool

that’s all i can think of for now. one site will likely have all of these features (plus whatever else i can’t think of atm), while others would use some of them. i’m sure some custom code will be required, but i’m hoping to be able to do some of it myself. thanks in advance!

any comments? or any devs interested in helping bring this to life?