Expressionengine - member groups and modules
The beauty of any good Content Management System is that it can be tailored to your precise needs. Expressionengine is no exception and in this post I’ll explain some of the advanced features which can be utilised to make your site buzz!
Members and groups
If you need to restrict access to your content to certain people you can do this by creating Member Groups. This could be for internal use only (ie a simple intranet) or you may wish members of the public to subscribe before being allowed “inside”. You can even have multi level access which allows you to define “who can see what”.
Also with Member Groups each member can have a Profile which they can update themselves, if you allow them to. Profiles in EE can be a very powerful asset and they’re not limited to “members” - for instance you could use the Profile feature to manage your staff “who’s who” page, then each staff member would be able to update their own information at any time. You can even assign custom data fields for things like Job titles, Favourite colours or a CV.
And there’s more! Here’s a quick list of how you can customise each of your Member Groups:
- Allow/disallow posting of comments
- Allow/disallow use of the site search feature
- Allow/disallow private messaging and other email related functions
- Allow/disallow access to the control panel and any of it’s functions
- Allow/disallow editorial facilities such as editing content and categories
- Allow/disallow posting of information to one or more parts of the site
- Allow/disallow uploading of profile images (ie photo or avatars)
Photo Gallery
If you’ve twigged it you’ll have realised that Expressionengine’s features can be used in more way than one. The Photo gallery is no exception.
Of course you can use it simply as a photo album but it can be adapted for other media types such as video. How about a product catalogue, or a portfolio?... it’s all possible! The gallery also allows you to add custom information to accompany each photo/entry as well, if it was being used as a product catalogue think things like part number, size, date.
You can even create totally separate galleries for different purposes, you might want one gallery as your product catalogue and another for your holiday snaps - both can even have a totally different page style and layout, and by using Member groups you can even control who sees them.
Simple Commerce
A recent addition to EE was basic ecommerce functionality. Using only Paypal at the moment you can enable pay-per-access to parts of your site, or charge for one off items. It is quite simple at the time of writing but I’ve no doubt that the EE developers will be improving it as time goes on.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
If you’ve not heard of RSS before it can be a valuable tool to broadcast your latest news. People can subscribe to your news via RSS (using their web browser or other software) and be updated instantly when you post something new - if you want to keep your customer infomed on a regular basis you can see the benefits! You can also allow other sites to display your news on their site using RSS - a great way of getting new traffic to your site.
Wiki
What’s a Wiki? Probably the best known Wiki is Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia that anyone can add to or edit. Of course EE doesn’t force you to allow every Tom, Dick and Harry to edit your Wiki but you can allow or disallow any of your site members full or limited access.
So what uses might a Wiki have? A Wiki is a source of collaborative content, a place where information can be shared, so this could be things like product support information, an archive of “tips and tricks”, or a repository such as a glossary of terms.
So that’s a quick overview of some of Expressionengines features. Hopefully you’re getting the idea that it’s adaptable to all sorts of web site scenarios - it is sometimes difficult to see how various functions can be adapted but that’s what your web designer is for - to use the best tools at his/her disposal to produce what you need!
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