Pulling data into a Template

Hi Folks,

I am new to MODX and have arrived here througha recommendation by a freind and also by Wordpress's limitations. I have two challenges and wonderin if MODX is my dream come true...(please forgive my newbiness!):

1) I'd like to create a registration front end which is invite only - so only people with a specific email link or code can register, and that code give them viewing access to certain pages (a bit like Facebook I guess - where you can only see certain other people's profiles ho you are friends with)

2) I would also like a user to be assigned the right to create a page which others can view or be invited to view. What would be the easiest way for a non-techie to create a form with a number of fields (including image upload), and then pull that data to be displayed in a template (i.e. a static page of content)? I'd also like the "owner" of that content to be able to update the data at will.

Would these require specific coding skills or are there add-ons like this already created that I can pull in?

Many Thanks,
Z

There's no question that MODX can do that, but I don't know of any way either of those could be done without some custom coding.

For #1, I would use the Register snippet (part of the Login package). I'd send them an email with a link to the Register page and $_GET parameters in the URL that included their email and a hash of their email address. Then I'd put a custom snippet on the Register page, above the Register snippet, that checked the hash against the email and forwarded them to the Home page (or some other page) if they don't match.

For #2, I think I'd use NewsPublisher. You could forward them to the NewsPublisher page with a postHook in the Login snippet tag. Make sure you name their personal page with some value from their user profile (first part of their email, username, etc.) so you can calculate where to send them. For more security, you could use a hash of that value instead of the value itself.

You can enforce letting them only edit their own pages with this method: http://bobsguides.com/blog.html/2013/04/28/newspublisherrestricting-users-to-their-own-pages/.

Letting them allow selected users to see their pages, would be tricky. That would take another custom snippet or two.

TBH, I think you'll have to either learn PHP, or hire someone who knows it. There's a nice PHP primer in the Appendix of my book: http://amzn.to/Qfsl1Z.

Welcome to MODX.

You can also use a snippet to have image or file TVs give each user his own folder in the file system for his images or other files. http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/MIGX.Use+resource-specific+media+source+and+multifile-uploader