Multiple User Hack

Well I did it, I got Power CMS working. Thank you, thank you, ... no really that enough applause. It’s a nice little program and I like it but I must say that my computer has a serious problem with the How To PDF’s. It seems to change them, delete things and put gibberish in some spots. After pulling out some hair and cursing at the computer, I spent a few hours on the Support Forums and finally got it figured out. Looking at these forums I notice other people have the same problem with their computers rendering the documentation almost useless.

I like the program but there are a couple of minor changes that I think will make it ready for the big leagues. Right now there is only one user mode for the program and that’s Administrator. This is supposed to ease the web admin’s job by allowing clients to enter their own data. My concern is all the delete functions available to the client. These deletes are designed to remove the Content completely, not just erase it so it can be replaced with updated information.

I can see it now.

Web Designer: Hello
Client: Hi. I went to erase my data to replace it with new information and everything disappeared.
WD: I see.
WD: Did you hit the Delete button I told you never to click on? Last time I had to come out and reinsert the content.
C: No I didn’t do that again. There was a different Delete in another spot, I thought maybe that was the one I was supposed to use.
WD: I see.
C: I need you to come out here again and fix it. We need this right away. I don’t think we should have to pay either. You never told me not to hit that delete.
WD: I see.

I’m a firm believer that if you give someone something to click on eventually they will. As a quick and dirty hack to fix this I’ve opened all the pages in the admin folder in Dreamweaver and did a Save As with a slightly different name. I then opoened these new files and removed delete from where ever I could. I would also like to remove the Insert New Content tab but haven’t figured out how to do that yet. I can then create the content under the admin logon, rename all the files to make the new ones available to the client. Oh and I created a new wa_globals file with the new user name and added that name to the database as well. This seems like a lot of work but saves potential problems in the future.

I’m really a new user and find there is a horrendous learning curve to getting these products working. But the guys on the support forum seem very knowledgeable and with the products you have it should be no great task to create multiple logons. I’m sure they could do in 20 minutes what would take me many hours to figure out. So why don’t you use the User Registration Solution Pack to create multiple users and the Security Assist to Determine whether they are Admin or Users? I bet I could do it eventually and I don’t even know what I’m doing. If you really want this program to be top notch you could spend another 20 minutes programming and use Security Assist to attach users to content area so multiple users could be given their own content area. It’s a good program but it seems to be it could be much better with little effort.

Oh and I really need to thank Neilo and Gruant for the work they’ve done, them make understand this much easier.

Just my 2 cents.