I guess this isn't so much of a "How do I" question, as a "how would you", or "would you do this at all" question.
I have a job coming up, rebuilding the Content Management System for a restaurant / bar chain with about 12 locations spread out across the U.S.
I think drupal will be the best choice for the job, but I'm not sure about a couple issues.
Each location has to have it's own content, managed by someone on site. The actual pages are fairly static, and largely what you'd expect. Menu, upcoming events, catering, etc. Each location's site will have identical design as the rest. There is also a corporate site (sharing same design, but different info). The different pub's sites would be accessible through either subdomains or sub directories, whichever works best for the project, but they would all be available from a common domain.
all of that is simple enough, here's the part where it gets tricky. there's two points I'm hung up on.
1. in addition to each pub having it's own admin, there is a regional admin who will have admin access to all the pubs in that part of the country. On top of that, there is a superadmin at the corporate headquarters that has access to every site. That in and of itself isn't too big of a deal, but they have one requirement that they're not willing to budge on. It's a feature on their current CMS, where the regional admin and the superadmin have the ability to edit a page (for example the menu page), and before submitting, check a box that says something like "apply to all pubs", and that content will overwrite to the existing page for every pub's site they have access to modify.
2. Like I said before, the number of pages will be static. The content admins will only be editing existing pages. BUT, they want to give the pub admins the ability to turn items in the menu navigation on or off, allowing them to hide certian pages for whatever reason. That seems well suited to drupal's menu module, but there is a problem of only letting the admins access menus that they are supposed to.
Other than that, drupal could easily fulfill all the requirements. Given that, and seeing as how it's the CMS I have the most experience with, I'd love to use it. I'm fairly competant with module development, but I'd kind of like some input on how to handle these issues.
A couple routes I've thought of.
1. To address the "batch update content" feature (which for the record I don't think is a good idea, makes it way too easy to mess up other peoples content), I thought of using a different flexinode for each page (menu, about us, etc). Then if someone needs to batch update a set of pages, a module could be written that would update every "about us" type node that the current user has access to update. It would be really tedious setting up all the different node types, but the update code would be fairly simple.
The other way I can see it working is to somehow keep a list of what nodes belong to what users, and what page they represent (a defined content set for each pub), then query that list for ID's and do the updates that way.
2. The menu access issue. I thought of either hacking some new permissions into the menu module to allow for access to specific menus.
or, possibly easier, add another flexinode type ("pub_menu" or something) that's basically a list of checkboxes for each available page, then when the actual publicly viewable page is served, the menu(s) can be dynamically built by some code that queries that flexinode.
Anyway, if anyone has some advice or some opinions on how they might proceed with something like this, I'd love to hear it! Thanks for taking the time to read such a long post!
Thanks!
Robby
