Need different home page based on user

[tgoold]

Does anyone know how to show a home page based on the user? Where I work, there are different business units and we want to build an Intranet that will show a home page based upon the business unit. Also, does anyone know of where to get information on building a personalized home page? We would like each person to be able to select the things they want on their Intranet home page. I've looked at pageflakes and netvibes but don't know if they can be used for those purposes.

[ilssac]

Tell me how you know User Tom works for Marketing, User Dick works for IT and User Harry works for Payroll (or whatever you mean by 'business units'); and I can probably tell you how to make a custom home page for each.

There are several solutions you may want to consider.

The first Idea I had, was a switch statement in a Applicaiton.cfc or Application.cfm file.

It would also be pretty trivial to have a dynamic home page that includes different content based on the buisness rules that identify what it should display for different users.

I suspect there are interesting things that might be possilbe at the web server level, especialy with Apache.

So, what do you really want to do and how would you like to try and do it?

[tgoold]

Hi Ian,

thanks for your help.

Your first question of how you know "Tom" works in marketing: It's possible that we would be able to pull that information from our HR database. That's something we would have to check out. But let's assume that's what we are going to do.

We have several business units, plus several field offices throughout the state (we are a government agency). We are going to build an Intranet for the whole agency, which will include all the business units and the field offices. Each unit or office has different uses for the Intrannet and we would like to have the availability for each used to design their own home page. We would like to give them several options of things they can select to have on their own page, or in other words, be able to select what they want from a list of items that we provide. If they decide not to create a personalized home page, we would like a default home page that represents their unit or office to display. So the Communications department would have a different home page from the Legal department and so on. Then, we would like them to be able to personalize their home page if they want to. Does that make sense?

At this point, we are just beginning on the site and haven't even started coding yet, but we need to know if this is doable or not. I might add that we aren't advanced programmers, more like intermediate, so I hope it's something we can pull off. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[ilssac]

I'm leaving in two minutes to catch the train home.

The concepts you are talking about are not all that difficult.

ColdFusion as plenty of capability to create dynamic pages based on a well defined set of business rules.  The dificlut part is usually determining what these rules really are and how to apply them.

So working with your asumption that you have worked this out.  Just one of many possible solutions would be something like this in your 'home page'

<cfswitch expression="#variables.businessunit#">

<cfcase value="Legal"><cfinclude template="legal_home.cfm"></cfcase>

<cfsase value="HR><cfinclude template = "hr_home"></cfcase>

....

</cfswitch>

This is not a fully thought out proposal, just a brain storiming idea to show what type of things are possible.

As for allowin a user to customize their own page.  Again this is not a difficult concept.  You would just need a data store, probably a database, that stores an individual choices for their home page.  The your home page logic would read this data, fetch the selected pieces from whereever and build this page.

The difficult part of this scenario is building a user interface that makes it easy and clear for the users how they can personalize their page.

Well I'm off to the train now, more thought tomorrow if you care to continue.

[tgoold]

Thanks for the help. Yes, I could envision this working for the business units the way you have said for the home pages set up by unit.

I guess I'm wondering on the personalized pages, how to get the design right. I mean if someone selects something like a weather app, which takes up a certain amount of the screen, and another person doesn't select the weather app, will there be a 'blank spot' on the screen where the weather app should be? Is there a way the user can move things around? That's sounding a little javascripty, but not sure that can be done. do you know what I'm talking about?

[Daverms]

TGoold,

Do you want to have an interface like this? (like iGoogle),

http://interface.eyecon.ro/demos/sort.html

If so you may need to incorporate a good JS framework like ExtJS (or) JQuery with your application.

[tgoold]

Oh, I love that! Is that jquery? Do you have any idea what the script is called?

[Daverms · Accepted solution]

Hi tgoold,

Its actually the "Sortable" script that comes along with JQuery, You can have more info and demo at,

http://view.jquery.com/tags/ui/latest/demos/functional/#ui.sortable

and if you need any tutorials you can make use of these links too,

[Tutorial]

http://zanshin.net/2008/11/12/using-jquery-to-create-igoogle-style-drag-and-drop/

http://labs.dropit.se/blogs/post/2009/02/24/iGoogle-Drag-and-Drop-functionality-with-jQuery.aspx

[Demo]

http://geek.zanshin.net/

HTH

[tgoold]

Daverms, thanks for the links. Those look exactly like what I'm looking for. I appreciate everyone's help. I'm going to go play with these scripts now.

[Guest]

I've worked on a personalized homepage before and there's a decent amount of thought that goes into it. For starters I made a db table for homepage locations, gave each location and ID, made a table for homepage cubes (calendar,weather,hottie of the day (jk)) and then had a user table for preferences.  The user could go into a homepage config page and choose with drop-downs which cube would apear where, when submitted it would store the preference. A homepage visit would check for the user logged in or cookie, and load that set of homepage cubes. If it wasn't present it would do a default.

I don't have the site code/db in front of me but that's the jist of it.

[tgoold]

that sound like what I'm looking for. I'm a little unsure of what the database table for locations holds. Is it locations on the screen? Is there any way you could send me some code to look at?