Forums (Obsolete)

Old Forums

Portal Engine Questions on portal engine and web parts.

Version 4.x > Portal Engine > We are looking for a better kentico solution for our community site. Need your help!

View modes:

Certified Developer v7

kenticonewbie - 4/29/2009 3:35:44 PM

We are looking for a better kentico solution for our community site. Need your help!

We are trying to use Kentico Portal Engine to develop a community site for our client. Since we are still new to the Kentico CMS, we would like to hear some suggestions from you guys regarding what would be a better solution for our case scenario.

Here is the basic outline of the project. We are delivering a site that will provide users to submit and share veteran stories. Users do not need to sign up or register as a member to be able to submit stories. The stories won’t be published to the site until they are approved by the administer persons. The administer persons have full access to the submission data and manage them. Breaking the functionality down to the public users and the admin users, the site includes 2 modules:

1. Public site – submit and browse stories module.

The story submission involves two steps:
a) Veteran Basic Info submission form – this page allows users to submit veteran’s basic information, including their name, home province, conflict etc.

b) Veteran Story submission form – this page allows users to submit veteran’s story which includes story details (long description) and related artifacts such as story photos, interview audio and even video. We would like to let the users have the ability to upload multiple image files and the images can be automatically resized before uploaded.

Users are able to browse stories sorted by veteran name, conflict and theme etc. and will be able to search for the veterans and their artifacts too.

2. Admin module.

For the admin person, we will try to let them be able to manage the stories submission data through the CMSDesk without developing an external admin tool.

What we want to look into is to know:

1. Does Kentico portal engine provide the flexibility and ability to implement the above functionality without too much .Net coding?

2. What will be a better solution to implement this with Kentico? We tried creating new document types, for example VeteranInfo, VeteranStory, VeteranStoryArtifect, to store the data, but we still don’t how to link them together establishing one to many relationship - sort of like the one to many relationship in the database. And how we handle the submission data in the backend code to store into the CMS database so they are recognized as document type items? Is kentico CMS API a right way to look into to do this?

3. We assume that we will need to create user controls for the story submission. And we will use kentico CMS API to store the data into the right database tables. Is this the right way to go? Could you provide us any of the online references to look at?

4. Does kentico provides a web part to upload multiple images files, retrieve image resolution and resize images before uploading?

Kentico Developer

kentico_ondrejv - 4/29/2009 4:41:01 PM

RE:We are looking for a better kentico solution for our community site. Need your help!

Hello,

We really appreciate your interest in our product Kentico CMS. Firstly I would like to say, that there will be no need to programming mentioned features. They are presented out-of-the-box (as far I can see from your description).

Regarding your scenario:

1) You will base this functionality on the 'User Contribution' module: devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/user_contributions_overview.htm. This enforces adding content to the site from the live site.

a) User will firstly register himself within your page using registration form. You can modify it according your needs: devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/creating_a_custom_registration_form.htm

b) Once he is logged in to the system he can add any content you allow him to add (well you can allow adding content to public user). devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/example_publishing_community_news.htm. He can upload file you allow him to the media library: devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/uploading_files_into_media_libraries.htm (I would recommend you to go through whole chapter.)

2) Admin interface - CMS Desk - is ready to manage added documents. When is document under the workflow administrator is able to approve/publish it: devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/defining_a_workflow.htm

Regarding your questions:

1) Yes, described above :-)

2) When you create new document within 'CMS Desk -> Content' you need to choose appropriate document type you wish to be like (it's connected automatically). It will have fields that are defined in: 'Site Manager -> Development -> Document types -> particular_document_type'. You can fill these document type fields related to current document in: 'CMS Desk -> Content -> document -> Form tab'.

You don't need to use API to link document and document type. Please see more info about it here: devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/defining_a_new_document_type.htm

3) You need to use User contribution module described above (sometimes called wiki).

4) Media library provides ability to upload images and you can also edit images as you wish. Only limitation is that you can upload one file at time (asp.net limitation). Also see description above.

Best Regards,
Ondrej Vasil

Top