sorry if it is a long text, I’ve divided it to 3 problems, so you may just read one section or all of them to help a newbie. thank you very much
Hello. I’m coming from modular programming and embedded scripts in html world. I’m completely familiar wit OOP and recently with MVC. my next project is a service for building e-shops for “traditional business mans”, guys with no computer skill. I’m here to ask you: “what is the best solutions around Yii for my Problems?”. here we have problems list, you may help me on any of them, please. thank you:
Problem A. Using themes, I want a drag & drop layout designer to enable my traditional guys to change their e-shop layout without even a line of coding. I’ll define some WIDGETs for them, for example: ‘product list widget’ that will get category and count of products to show in a thumb & title format. also I want some 'area’s on the pages (home, basket, payment, category…) so user can add, sort, remove widgets in that predefined area, different from theme to theme. to be clear, something similar to concepts described on this page: crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/carrington-build
how to do? yes it’s a sophisticated thing to answer, just the idea, based on Yii. I don’t know, I have to display view files in layout editor then after changes save that file again, I have to use databases and define widgets for each page o area, I have to…? yet a newbie here to find solution with Yii.
Problem B. We have a BOSS who is manager of service, she can create a new shop for a customer or maybe remove other one. let say boss has a new customer, she wants to create a new shop with default setting. what is the best solution? my options: 1) all customers use the same ‘system’ so for a new customer we just create a new database. 2) like 1, but we use table prefix for different customers, ‘cust226_tbl_products,cust227_tbl_product…’. 3) just create a new directory structure for any user and also a new database!
so what is the best? in Yii is it possible to switch between databases in run time? what about backup cron jobs?
Problem C. Plug-in system! yes. I want to have some available plug-ins, then one of my shop administrators install (actually add/buy) a plug-in that make him able to show some banners in slide-show manner on home page. after install we actually grant access to that plug-in, not a real install.
plug-ins have a special ‘panel’ in shop admin area and maybe some navigation items in different sections too. even we want plug-in related widgets to be available after installing that plug-in, so admin can add widget in home page on elsewhere. so what to do?!
thank you