Can/should I do this in CMSMS? (opinions wanted) Topic is solved

[Grantovich]

I have been asked to build a website that will be a centralized access point for finding local volunteer opportunities. Organizations looking for volunteer work would nominate a single "administrator" who would receive an account on the site and be allowed to make posts restricted to their associated category/section, as well as editing their general description page.

Since I am familiar with CMSMS from past projects, I first approached this request from that angle. I thought to use the News module to make postings, because it's more freeform and dynamic than regular pages, and it has categories and a built-in RSS feed. Problem detected! There is no way to restrict certain users to only post news in certain categories; the permissions are all-or-nothing. Furthermore, each news article can only have one category, which will be extremely limiting considering the number of organizations that will be participating. Finally, there is no way outside of RSS to display only posts in a certain category or combination of categories, as far as I can tell.

Now I have doubts about the suitability of CMSMS for this project. So I ask: What is your opinion? Perhaps some sort of blog or forum software would better fit the bill? Maybe I'm just stupid and have overlooked some obvious feature that solves all my problems?

[Pierre M.]

Hello,

here is a weak opinion, because I too can miss a feature (or module) that solves your problem. CMSms has dozens of modules, after all.

You want to build an HR system. These are obviously databases. They provide data structures to categorize and autorize as you want. CMSms core is not such a system.

But may be you can use CMSms to publish the description/details/pictures of the opportunities along with the structured information in the HR system. In the database, each "item" has a description link to a CMSms page.

Or could FormBuilder and FromBrowser be associated to FrontEndUser to make the database side ?

Pierre M.

[calguy1000]

Have you checked out the jobs module?

It may be close to what you want... and if it is, you can possibly contact a developer (Ted) to tweak it to do what you need.

[Grantovich]

Just to be clear on this, the three specific items I mentioned above are the only items (currently) that present an obstacle to completing this project in plain vanilla CMSMS. I am not building anything that could be described as a job database, it is really just a multiple-author blog where posts are often deleted as well as added. That said, I'd like to use CMSMS's ability to have a hierarchy of static pages alongside the multi-blog, where each author has their own static page they can edit.

[calguy1000]

You're correct, CMS's news module is all or nothing wrt permissions.  And an article can only have one category. 
CMSMS is not an articles based site, it is a pages based site.  if articles are going to be added and deleted regularly, and you need fine grained permissions on each article, you may need to look to something else.