Can MODx handle Document Management Requirements?

I have a client request.

The project has the following requirement:

1. Allow prospecting vendor (the system users) sign up to download tender documents
2. If vendor decide they want to bid for the tender requirement, allow users to subscribe to future correspondence.
3. Provide report on when documents were downloaded and by which vendor. This can come as a activity log that is emailed periodically.
4. Allow client to mail vender who subscribed (in 2 above).
5. Add vendor to usergroup based on form field selection
6. Allow client to mail vendor or usergroup from within MODx.
7.

Please can you advise or suggest how MODx can handle this requirement? What snippets or approach fit the bullet items?

Thanks.
[ed. note: ojchris last edited this post 13 years, 4 months ago.]

1. You can do this using the Login extras Register snippet
2. Possibly create a custom form using FormIt so they can subscribe for individual items (Not sure what your trying to do exactly)
3. This sounds like something custom you would have to build that logs the users activity
4. Again not clear on what exactly it is you want to do if it's message the user when ever the vendor feels like it or if it's automatically when they signup, but you would probably need to use FormIt again.
5. You could use Login extra UpdateProfile to change what usergroup the user belongs to you can also assign what user group they will belong to when they register so keep that in mind
6. You would either have to see if you can do this using MODX built in messaging system (I haven't used it) or create your own custom messaging system

Most of these things can be done but you need to have a solid knowledge of PHP and MODX in order to execute it there are no one extra that will do this all for you, also some of these things can be done via the front end whereas some of the others you want to do have to be done in the manager so you need to know how to create CMP's if that't not something your comfortable with then you will have a hard time getting a lot of this done.

Hopefully this gives you a better idea on what you can do and how to approach it, Good Luck.

Hey Ben. Thanks for the response. yea, my script was written rather in hurry. I'll try again

1.) The clients is requesting for interest Vendors to tender and bid for specific projects. So the client makes available the tendering documents on their website for the prospecting vendor to download. That is how it is now.

2.) Going forward, they want to track the access their the tender documents they provide on the website. So hence forth, vendors will have register on the site first before they can download the tender documents. Once they do, go through the document and decide to bid for the projects, they will indicate their interest to bid by subscribing (on the website - via existing account) to receive future correspondence about the project they are choosing to bid for.

Might be good to indicate when the files were uploaded to the website.

3.) The client will like to know which of the vendors (the registered users) downloaded a document and when. These can come as log table.

4.) All registered vendors will be added to a user group but those users that indicated further interest by way of biding need to be added to another user group. So like a mailing list system, client wants to be able to contact these user groups with a single message and still client wants to be able to decide to contact individual vendor (where the needed arises).

5.) Something I didn't state previously, client want to able to upload the tender documents to the site without a need for technical web expert. MODx file system in manager is not really very friendly to non-techies.

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The best, fast solution might not be MODx and yet might be. I have used MODx successfully on several basic sites but on more specific dynamic requirement MODx has worked but with tiring customization for basic task. I want to get ideas that would help decide whether MODx can do this seamlessly and conveniently (I really pray it does!)

Thanks

I would use Static Resources to access your documents. This way you can protect the documents by storing them outside of the web root, control access to them using regular user management, and use a plugin to log when and who downloads, plus perform any other actions on download.

You can create custom content types (such as PDF) as binary, then set the static resource to be of your custom PDF type and have the content disposition of attachment instead of inline, and clicking on a link to the static resource will product the browser's usual way of handling such content types - for example, I have my browser set to download PDF files, so I get the download dialog instead of being redirected to another page; others will have it set to download, open and read the PDF file.

As far as making an easy upload for your client users, I would have a page with a custom upload using one of the several JQuery drag-and-drop uploading scripts. Use the QuickBar add-on to provide a menu for accessing the custom page from the front-end.

Or perhaps you could leverage this somehow http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/MIGX.Use+resource-specific+mediasource+and+multifile-uploader

I think MODX would meet your requirements as well or better than any other CMS system. You might consider Subscribe and Notify for emailing users and user groups and the FileUpload extra might also be useful.

There are probably one or more proprietary systems out there that will get you close out of the box, but they will be expensive and difficult or impossible to customize.

These are valuable ideas.

Thank you Sottwell. The correct link is: http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/MIGX.Use+resource-specific+media+source+and+multifile-uploader

I tried to used MIGX recently and was forced to abandoned it. I hate to complain about this: many of the MODx snippet with impressive promise often don't get setup nicely. I'll try out that tutorial.

@Bob: I appreciate. Customization is necessary.

@Bob. I just found the EmailResource snippet which I think should help the client create resources and fire the content to desired users as a well formatted email. Are my correct?
One thing: 1) How do you think this can be used to email a single user?

@Sottwell: Currently, the links to the files provides an obvious structure of the site's directory (assets/mytemplates/doc/file.pdf). I would want to make the links encoded in such a way that you can't decipher merely by looking at the link. What do you advice? Is this what you referr to using static resource?

Yes. You can put these files outside of the web root, use ../whatever/file.pdf as the path in the static resource (instead of content), then the link will be to the static resource itself, not to the file.

There are file download managers to do much the same thing, but static resources have a number of advantages. You can have them as part of the Resource Tree, they can have all the fields including TVs that regular resources have so they can be listed with simple Wayfinder or getResources snippets, as well as being good for search or getRelated snippets.

You're correct about what EmailResource does, but it is fairly old and could stand some updating. That said, I think lots of people are using it successfully.

It has the option of sending a test email, and you can set the email address for the test email. That would let you send email to a single user. You could change the caption of the "Send Test Email" input to "Email a User" or something similar.

Notify lets you select users to send to by User Group, and/or Tag, so it could also be used. It sends a link to a resource rather than the resource itself.