[ic] Password-protecting part of a catalog

interchange-users@icdevgroup.org interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Wed Feb 26 11:57:01 2003


On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 11:12:55AM -0500, Bill Carr wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-02-26 at 10:05, Richard Watson wrote:
> > Bill Carr <bill@worldwideimpact.com> writes:
> > 
> > > On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 07:47, Richard Watson wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > > >  Most of the catalog will be open, but specific products
> > > > (maybe in specific groups) will be restricted each to a specific customer.
> > > > 
> > > > Any idea where I start on this?
> > 
> > > Check out:
> > > .access and .access_gate
> > 
> > Thanks to both Bills for the response.
> > 
> > It seems that .access will more or less do what I want, but it seems
> > that its quite tricky to administer by my customer. From my
> > understanding it could well be beyond him to add a user to an area and
> > would get quite messy with many customers and many different areas.
> One approach would be to have an .access_gate like this:
> *: [your_usertag]
> 

I'd not bother go that path.

You are going to have to handle the restrictions at the data level somehow.
That means some sort of mask or product list per customer
(or group of customers).  

If you just do file level access permissions, there is nothing to stop
any customer from finding "restricted" products.  If you restrict the
products, then you don't need the file level access.

So at some point you have to set session data about the customer; that
could be behind a password protected page but it seems like overkill.
We do that sort of thing with coupons, where a customer fills in a
number, goes to a landing page that sets whatever in the session and
then redirects them out to appropriate destination.  Even that is
overkill; why can't you do this with user accounts?

-- 

Christopher F. Miller, Publisher                               cfm@maine.com
MaineStreet Communications, Inc           208 Portland Road, Gray, ME  04039
1.207.657.5078                                         http://www.maine.com/
Content/site management, online commerce, internet integration, Debian linux