Setting up a CMS

[NIA2]

Hi everyone,

I'm in the process of creating an online ordering system for a clothing business where their clients can place orders via their website. It will be for certain corporate customers where they can order their uniforms online, so it's not really a shopping cart. The clothing company (my client) would have produced a range of uniforms for a particular company and this company's employees would be able to order their uniforms online.

The first step is getting all the employees to register, which is where I'm having problems trying to figure out how to set this up. This registration page won't be visible to the general public since it's only being used for certain clients who need to register in order to access their custom page which displays a list of their uniform items. I thought of the idea where the clothing company provides a one-off username and password for the client company which is used by all employees of that company to login via the login form (accessible from a link on the home page) and this takes them to the registration page where each employee can set up their own username and password etc. then once the registration is completed by each employee, then they can login with their own username and password, in future, via the publically accessible link on the home page and land on their custom page populated with the uniform items.

Can someone comment on this setup? I mean is this idea of providing the username and password to say a manager of the client company who then passes this username and password on to all employees so they can register, a good way to go? Or is their a better option? If it is a good setup, how would I generate this username and password so that it's unique to a client company?

Appreciate any advice offered.

 

[jpadie]

personally i would always want each individual user to have separate credentials. you can always assign a user to a group to manage access control that way. authorisation, however, should be at an individual level imo.

 

[NIA2]

Thanks for the reply,

Each user would have separate credentials after they had initially registered, ie. by creating their own username and password. The problem is how to give them access to the registration page in the first place.

You mentioned assigning a user to a group to manage access control. I assume "access control" here means access to the registration page - is that right? If yes, then how do I assign a user to a group - can you explain further?

 

[Foamcow]

How about sending each one an email with a unique code they need to enter in order to register?

The code could be derived from the company name so you could check whether they should be permitted to register.

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[NIA2]

Yeah my original post mentioned that is what I planned to do, i.e provide a unique username and password to a manager of the company who would then email this information to all employees so they could login to the registration form via a form that is accessed from a link on the home page.

I just wanted to know how to generate this username and password and whether this setup is the most efficient way to go. Has anyone had any experience with this type of setup?

jpadie mentioned assigning a user to a group to manage access control but not sure what this involves. Can someone expand further on this?

 

[smah]

You could consider letting the client companies manage who of their employees should be allowed to create individual accounts. Depending on the client companies, this could a bit of a problem to get them to accept it, but if they do, there's virtually no additional work for you.

The client company could set up some private page on their own website and control access to it however they wish. This page would contain a link to your individual sign-up/sign-in page, then all you need to do is check against a select list of referrer pages.