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Rizha
17 Apr 2011, 10:54 PM
Hi,

I am looking for some helpful suggestions. I need to design a site containing numerous read-only documents (only the original author may modify them). Each member will have a unique password and will be redirected to a list containing only those documents to which they have subscribed. Admin will be able to change what docs these members have access to based on certain criteria. Members will have limited communication connected to the doc (maybe like comments on a blog? don't know yet). Other members registered to view these same docs will also be able to view this communication and respond (forum style?). Members need to be able to print and/or download the docs to their own media, so the docs will be in PDF format (unless there's a better way to do this).

I have a hosted domain running Linux, PHP, MySQL. I can install software if necessary, but would only want to go with open source.

So, my question is, what would be the best route to accomplish this type of site? The site is currently running Wordpress and I could create a link from the main site, or create a subdomain. I could easily change over to Joomla. I don't know anything about any other types of CMS. I don't know much about Wiki software but am willing to experiment.

Of course, I could always try to code this from scratch (and learn a lot in the process). But in the interest of time, I'd like to see if there are any easier solutions. I am comfortable enough with phpMyAdmin to create databases to store member, author, and other info. But how about the content management? I have good knowledge of HTML and CSS, and am in the process of learning PHP and JavaScript. Don't know much about jQuery but I'm willing to learn whatever it takes to get this accomplished. I'm also very curious and am willing to examine whatever code I can get my hands on.

So if anyone has any ideas on how I should go about accomplishing this type of site, any and all help would be very much appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Rizha
22 Apr 2011, 10:50 AM
If anyone is interested, I loaded up DokuWiki (http://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki). Lots to configure, but it comes with excellent documentation and their forum is very useful.

I'm still in the process of tweaking it. There is no way to set permissions on individual documents, only on groups of members. So I'll have to setup each member as their own group, then set the permissions as to which docs they can access. All in all, with a little readjustment of what I want vs. what I can get, it's working.

I haven't tried customizing the theme yet. If anyone has done this and discovered any good tips, please post.