[milauskas]

Hi all,

I had an inquiry from a potential client about a website he is thinking about starting. I'm looking for advice on the best way to approach this.

The site would need to have an area where customers can view certain documents. Over the course of time, there could be quite a lot of documents so I think storage will be an issue.

These documents will need to be private so I envision having a secure customer login. The client (my client) wants to put his customers documents in different areas (e.g., all X documents in one category, all Y documents in another category).

I'm looking for input on what to use to develop such a site. What do you think I would need? Has anyone done anything similar requiring secure access? And what possible legal issues might arise?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

[dddougal]

Theres lots of different ways of doing this. Are the customers going to be uploading and sharing documents with groups of people....Project teams and things? Or are they just looking at documents that have already been put up there?

Are you talking about developing your own site from scratch or are you going to use an off the shelf option? There are lots of off the shelf document control packages, to be honest they all seem to have the same fault in that when you have so many documents it becomes impossible to find anything you need.

If you were going to do this from scratch I think it would involve PHP, sessions and some clever table designs. The documents would need to have unique numbers and then reference these numbers in your database design. All categories and privileges of users, which files they can view etc could be stored in the database...You would need to add some kind of security to stop people just loading the docs up but it wouldn't be to difficult to achieve.

To go into more detail would require a project brief of some kind.

[milauskas]

Thanks dddougal,

I appreciate the reply. Sorry I am so late in replying--I was pretty busy over the Christmas season and didn't get back to the forum until now.

The project is nebulous. A colleague of mine is just kind of thinking of starting a new business and gave me some vague spec on what his site might involve so I don't have a lot of info (and I'm really supposed to keep things secret).

Can you tell me what some of these off the shelf things are so I investigate? I did also assume there would be some PHP involved in such a project.

I'm just trying to get an idea of what I can do and what I would need to charge him if he wanted me to develop this project.

Thanks for any help.

Mike

[luizarios]

milauskas, on 09 January 2012 - 08:52 PM, said:

Thanks dddougal,

I appreciate the reply. Sorry I am so late in replying--I was pretty busy over the Christmas season and didn't get back to the forum until now.

The project is nebulous. A colleague of mine is just kind of thinking of starting a new business and gave me some vague spec on what his site might involve so I don't have a lot of info (and I'm really supposed to keep things secret).

Can you tell me what some of these off the shelf things are so I investigate? I did also assume there would be some PHP involved in such a project.

I'm just trying to get an idea of what I can do and what I would need to charge him if he wanted me to develop this project.

Thanks for any help.

Mike

Mike,

You will need a combination of HTML, CSS, PHP and SQL (maybe even some javascript) to do such a site.

I know a very good off the shelf program called Joomla http://www.joomla.org/, it is one of the most powerful CMS's with plenty of extensions, it naturally allows you to add several users and give different levels (ranging from the super admin that will be allowed to do everything on the site to the registered user that will only be allowed to read/download their own content), this comes in the package so as soon as you install Joomla this part is done for you. Uploading file is also very easy with Joomla. Joomla is open source and free, most web hosts will allow you to install it with a click and the forum support is very good.

You asked about legal implications, this will depend on what kind of document you uploading, obviously you can't upload other people copyrighted materials, but if its your material or the material owner allows you to distribute it, then I can't see a problem.

Good luck

Luiza

[webdesigner93]

Hey mike,

As mentioned above you will need some php/mysql knowledge and a fairly good knowledge of file handling in php,i'd recommend breaking it down and not making it as complicated as it sounds, just start with a secure login area probably using ssl(A secure socket layer connection). Then you can start with an admin area for your client to upload his or hers documents as needed also allowing them to add cats etc... kinda like you would on a forum, i also recommend renaming your files to a random string as there unloaded since you did say you would like to make sure these files stay private. Hope this helps some to put things in perspective.

[milauskas]

HI Luiza,

I think I started looking into Joomla a year ago (then gave it up in favor of WordPress). I'll take another look and see what I can find--and if it may work for me.

THanks!

Mike

[milauskas]

HI WD93,

Thanks for the reply. My PHP knowledge is pretty lame so anything to do with file handling is probably not for me. In any case, that may help me to decide whether this is something I can do myself, or outsource the programming to someone with better skills.

Your advice at least helps me sort things out. I appreciate it.

Mike