I have started a little project for the work of an Animal Control Officer. I am trying to create a site that coveres everything from towns licensing, to ACO field reporting, to shelter organization. I have started with the licenseing part of things. By the way this will be one site for the whole state. Anyway I have the scripts and database setup for this one part. and it works! but now I am looking for something that will organize my scripts and provide user permission controls. I would like to set this up with one user system. Everyone, ACO’s, town clerks, shelter employees, police, ect. can login on the same page and have access to thier respective areas. I also need a way to set permissions for my scripts so I need to be able to pass the user data into my scripts with the group and permission level.
http://www.heroframework.com/ This looks like a very possable solution. I am basically looking for any input or any ideas. I spend more time on the internet looking for scripts and other ways to do thing. I want to make everything the best it can be.
PS. I am a self taught coder and still learning. I really like things with examples I can mess with. I tend to learn best when I break things.
It is not easy nor recommended to take your custom code and attempt to bolt on a CMS or framework. Either continue down the path of all custom programming or choose a CMS/Framework than rewrite your existing functionality to mesh with the patterns and utilities promoted by that solution.
Also be weary of people of blindly promote things before knowing all the little details. WP by itself doesn’t really handle the majority of your features. You would probably need an extensive amount of add-ons, even if they exist. Than getting them all to play well together is a whole other story.
Anyone who recommends WP for a web application which is pretty much what your building doesn’t know what they are talking about. WP is just about the least ideal platform to create a web application.
If you aren’t confident to build on top of what you’ve created so far there’s not much hope you will do any better on a 3rd party application.
No matter what platform you go to, be it a framework or a platform like WP or Drupal, there is a large learning curve as well as a need to learn the fundamentals of programming to not create something horrible.
Also the notion that it will ever be the best it can be is pointless, it never will be. What you are looking for is an acceptable level, which it sounds like you aren’t there yet.
If you had to go with a platform, I would recommend Drupal - it is intended to be more customizable and gives quite a bit of control over individual user access via roles. However Drupal is, like any other platform, limited by its own complexity, so if you need something very customized - custom code is always the way to go.
If you possibly have the budget, you could consider hiring a contractor with a lot of experience to work with you because it honestly sounds like you are in way over your head. Then again if this isn’t mission critical - it could be a great learning experience if you decide to dig in and go at it.
Agreed. I’d like to know why too. I may be overstepping but a multi-site wordpress installation can set you up to utilize groups and user permission levels in an amazing way. So if you want a department section, you can set that up as a site, they have access to change things based on whatever permissions you give them, you can authorize logins to have access to multiple sites (departments), etc. You can ever limit what plugins/themes they can utilize too, so if you want everything to be consistent you remove all the themes (except the one you want them to use, force network only themes, and your done – same with plugins).
I’ve done this once before and it worked out well, was definitely a good learning experience (took me 3 or 4 tries to get it setup the way I wanted, but it wasn’t a huge pain).