Community Forums › Forums › Archived Forums › General Discussion › Discussion on how to handle nav / menus / permissions for an Intranet
Tagged: WordPress Intranet Menus
- This topic has 3 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 10 months ago by coralseait.
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May 11, 2015 at 7:33 pm #151804coralseaitMember
Hello Group,
Like to generate some discussion on how we could / should handle the navigation, menus and permissions for an Intranet style install. The project is related to the one in this posting: http://www.studiopress.community/topic/local-government-site-built-using-genesis/
The council loves the public site and would like to have an internal site that serves as their main portal for all things internal. They'd like to go with a very similar design, however the complexity is much more. This will integrate many disparate apps and locations (sharepoint locations, applications, ERP style applications for the core of their business, etc). The idea is that an employee could sit down, visit the intranet and have at their quick access all things they need to accomplish their role.
They love the icon based navigation and have asked essentially to bring this to an intranet. At a top level their idea is to have:
Organisation Menu <-- A Menu that everyone in the Org will have
Role Menu <--- Based on their primary job role
User Menu <--- Each user can customise with their favourites, or when they are seconded to other roles temporarily add functions to this menu.A statement has been made that a new employee should be able to sit down, hit the portal and have everything they need to get running. We'll also be consuming JSON feeds or RSS feeds from the disparate systems into what's the news / alert areas of the linked site above. Layout and design aren't the primary concern here, but how to handle the gluing of nav / meta data. Content likewise isn't a concern per se, we're not training them on how to use these disparate systems, just give them easy single click access to these systems that are most commonly used in their Roles.
We're thinking of having a master catalog of all things that could possibly be on menus or consumed on the Intranet as CPTs with custom fields (The icon, the URL / URI to the system, Description, Business Area Responsible, Key Users, etc, etc - whatever is needed).
The question is how to glue those up (or if another approach is better) to provide:
1) IT will create the master CPTs to form the catalog [or whatever approach works, but the idea is that IT adds / maintains the overall list of things that can be consumed on the Intranet]
2) Users will somehow consume these to form "menus" - this is quoted here because it may not be native WP menus, but are menus nonetheless as presented to the consumer of the intranet (think the icons on the linked site above). Native WP menus will become cumbersome in an organisation with hundreds of users and hundreds of roles. So we may have to do some magic of using the menu APIs to build them programmatic or even chain them via meta data, somehow. This is the first big part of my request for discussion.
3) Business Area Owners will somehow maintain the Role Menus (a limited number of Business Area Owners for each area will have an interface to chain menu CPTs together to form a Role Menu - For Example, TRC - Role - Customer Service; the manager and co-manager of this area would be responsible for menu maintenance of what items from the master catalog appear on on the specific Role Menu - thoughts on how we accomplish? Note, we're aware of the various switch menus by user plugins, but thinking again it may become extremely cumbersome with so many users and roles?
4) Users will be responsible to maintain their own menu. Obviously some sort of permissions will play here (for example, a payroll app won't be available to the gross user pool).
Permissions introduces the issue of integration to Active Directory and Role Management; we're inclined to use something like Members plugin but Single Sign On / OpenAuth etc IS going to become and issue and linking the AD IS going to become an issue.
So we have quite a complex and non-standard WP challenge we wish to face with Genesis of course as the backdrop. We've looked at the various Intranet Plugins and WP as Intranet Solutions and realistically the council feels they don't fit their bill well at all.
Any of the seasoned devs have any ideas or thoughts on handling these:
1) Menuing
2) Permissions / WP Roles and Capabilities Management with a view on AD
3) Role Management (The TRC's Roles, not WPs)We've done these before, but not necessarily with this depth or scope and so many disparate systems, sign-on challenges, roles, and users, etc - so thought some discussion would be good!!!
May 12, 2015 at 8:54 am #151853Victor FontModeratorWhat you are asking is a huge challenge. I was an IT Director for a large global pharmaceutical company. I designed and led the development of a provisioning infrastructure that does much of what you are asking. The trigger event was the addition of the new hire record in the HR system. Once the new hire record was added, an automated provisioning system (middle ware layer) took over and provisioned everything a new employee needed when they sat down at their desk for the first time. Role based access on an enterprise level is really tough to implement. We also had to build the deprovisioning system to revoke access when an employee left the company. I wish you the best in this pursuit.
Regards,
Victor
https://victorfont.com/
Call us toll free: 844-VIC-FONT (842-3668)
Have you requested your free website audit yet?May 12, 2015 at 3:40 pm #151912coralseaitMemberHello Victor,
Thanks very much for taking the time to write and relay your experience in industry with similar systems, really appreciate it. I too was a Director IT in aerospace and designed and deployed similar infrastructure to support design and manufacture of systems for various mil and commercial programs. It can be very daunting task.
Thankfully, here the TRC has a good foundation of roles and role management in their AD and within their various systems, so the intranet is more of a central landing portal for which to launch said apps from.
The trick / or task here is what is the best way to marry that within a WordPress ecosystem? We can quickly see the using native menu management will become unruly, but are wondering how else?
Custom WP Roles and Caps should suffice for permissions and esp if we can link the AD and grab roles from it. However, where we are really looking for discussion is how to handle the menuing?
Org Menu and Even Role Menus may well work within wp native menus, but User menus will be far too complex of maintenance burden. Here do we chain some user meta together with meta apis for storing the menus per user? Do we use the same for Role and Org, but then where is a good place to store these metas and against what? Or do we programmatically maintain WP menus / menu items via the menu apis and hide them from the native UI giving a custom one to maintain to help abstract menu maintenance a bit and provide the permissions layer for Org and Role menu maint?
There's obviously many options so we're hoping to have some discussion around that.
June 3, 2015 at 5:54 pm #154777coralseaitMemberHello All,
An update to this;
We've come up with an elegant solution, that we may turn into a plugin if there's interest. Active Directory tie in works great and Org, Role and User Supplementary Menus are working great as well.
The solution is decoupled from WordPress roles and capabilities for simplicity for this project and actually it seems to work quite well. The solution also uses a CPT for master catalog of items that can appear in menus.
Menu building is via the native WP Menu UIs, mappings are done via acf options.
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