An ASP.NET System To Allow Site Members To Contribute Content, Part 1: Overview
Crowdsourcing is all the rage these days, and even if you’re not managing a social media Web site, sometimes it’s helpful to accept content from end users.
For example, one of my clients has a community calendar on its Web site. Since the inception of the calendar, staff time had been devoted to retyping e-mailed and snail-mailed items into that calendar’s back end.
That was almost entirely wasted time, which my client rightfully wanted applied to something more profitable. My client wanted to allow staff to approve, edit or delete calendar submissions before they appeared on the site, but asked me to shift the burden of actually adding items directly onto the shoulders of site visitors.
Thanks to ASP.NET’s built-in membership system, we can easily provide a simple system for allowing end users to provide content. Not only that, but thanks to the role-based permissions incorporated into membership, we can even presort content to specific sections of the site, based on who is submitting it; grant specific users or user groups the ability to bypass an approval process; throttle contribution allowances; basically, any permission or restriction you might want to use.
(Aside: We can similarly implement a model like this in PHP, but it does not have a built-in membership provider. I may, at some later date, describe building a PHP membership provider that is similar to the ASP.NET model, at least in terms of practical use, if not mechanically similar.)
I am going to make a simple cancellations notification system as my demo.
After all, everyone wants to know if school is closed, or whether the play is still on in spite of the weather. Because canceling school, play, etc. generally comes down to a single person’s decision — or, at most, a few people — we can easily provide a system to log in, select a few options or enter a bit of text, and save everyone the time and grief such notifications otherwise take.
The specific features I will demo, in this and upcoming blog entries, will be:
- an administrative interface to add, edit and delete memberships;
- another administrative interface to add, edit or delete membership roles (i.e., membership groups), and to assign members to those groups, as well as to assign users to specific schools, organizations, etc.;
- an administrative interface to approve, edit or delete cancellation notices;
- a private form to allow membership to post cancellations for the schools, organizations, etc. with which they have been associated;
- a public view of cancellations that have been approved for viewing.
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