Hi there
I'm a graphic designer and I'm just about to leave my job to set up on my own. I use dreamweaver and fireworks to create websites, so my skills are mainly frontend, though I have dabbled in MySql and PHP, but only a little.
What I intend to do on my own website is to offer an area for my clients to log-in to their own page, where they'll be able to:
track the progress of an ongoing job
Leave notes/messages
send and receive files/pictures/PDFs
make a payment via PayPal and
talk live via 'Help Center Live' or similar system'.
All this needs to fit in with an existing design as much as possible.
After investigating lots of CMS systems and other options Drupal has impressed me so far. Would it be possible to create the above and if so, would it be really difficult for someone like me who's skills are mainly front end.
Thanks for your time!!
Comments
Generally possible, but perhaps not satisfactory...
First, a warning. Drupal is a power content management framework, but has some significant gaps. This means that although it is possible to do (almost) all of the things you specify, it may not be possible to do them exactly as you want. Drupal is still a bit of a 'programmers CMS' as getting things to precisely match your own needs often requires coding.
You'd probably have to experiment to find a way of doing this that suites your requirements. It could be done using a node for each job, with comments used to indicate progress, or using the project module. Ensuring that a given user can only access the nodes relevant to them can be awkward, but the 'simple access' or 'taxonomy access control' modules should help.
Perhaps as either as comments on a node (as mentioned above), or as issues in the project module.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'send and receive files', but Drupal does support uploads and attachments. Note that the image support provided by the image module may not be as powerful as you need.
The ecommerce and paypal modules should be able to deal with this, but I've not played with them extensively.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of any module that supplies this functionality. There are shared 'shoutbox' modules, but does not cover the one-to-one support you need. Perhaps this could be done using some other piece of software, but blended into Drupal so that it fits in overall.
This statement is worrying, as it is not clear how far this goes. Do you already have mountains of data to import? Or do you just mean an existing website design (HTML+CSS)?
I hope that helps.
Anj
Thanks for the reply.When I
Thanks for the reply.
When I said it needs to fit in with the exisiting design, I just mean the look of the page will need to be the same, exactly as you said - html and css.
Perhaps Dupal isn't for me then? Is there any other system you know of that I might be able to use?
I'm not aware of any package
I'm not aware of any package that will meet your needs precisely, but perhaps my knowledge is out of date. There's a lot of stuff out there, but any CMS usually ends up bending your requirements to fit.
Having said all of this, if there are no systems out there that meet your needs then Drupal is the best place to start building one that does (IMO of course!). If you can package your client-management ideas into fairly detailed proposals for one or more new modules, you might be able to get enough people interested in it that they start helping you create it.
Good luck.
Anj
Sticky point: Drupal permissions
I think the biggest stumbling block to this is the lack of privatization between Drupal content nodes. For example, you can create a user account for each of your clients. And, you can definitely do a lot of the things you have mentioned (e.g. post files, add comments, etc.). But there is no easy way to make it so that a specific file or node can only be seen by a specific user, and I know of no module that does that for you.
The best way to go about this would probably be to take advantage of Drupal's "multiple sites" feature. You can have Drupal running in its own directory, and have each client have their own Drupal site, and each of these sites would have their own Apache password-protected directory, say.
Four Years later
say welcome to open atrium http://openatrium.com/