Customer Portal
We currently use Host Gator to host our corporate website. On the site, a customer can log in with a username and password to view secure documents that we’ve prepared for them. The typical process is that the documents are uploaded into an FTP folder created for that customer. On the server, we create an FTP account for that customer, then assign the home folder to be where their document was stored. When they log in to our website, a simple script combines their username with the required at-ourdomain.com string required for the login by our host, then we pass the password they supply through and it opens a Windows Explorer site with their FTP home folder, thus revealing their documents and allowing them to download one or multiple files with ease.
Here’s an example of the Windows script we’re running to accomplish this:
explorer ftp://ftp.ourdomain.com:customer-at-ourdomain.com:password
This is a very unreliable method and has caused us lots of grief. We need a small database driven tool that takes the customer login information and delivers them to a page that will do the following:
1. When the customer logs in they are taken to a page that lists in chronological order all of the documents ever uploaded for them.
2. The customer can view individual documents or download multiple documents by placing a check mark next to the ones they wish to download. When they download multiple documents, all of the necessary files are zipped into a single file on the fly.
3. Administrators can use the backend of this program to log in and create customer accounts, change passwords, upload documents, edit or delete document details.
a. The database fields needed in the backend are: customer name, customer project, customer purchase order, date of report, report file(s) – single reports can have multiple attachments or files associated with them, report description, report title
b. The document filetypes are typically PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, JPG, GIF, BMP.
4. This site must be secure and will require use of SSL
5. We prefer to use MySql architecture as this is what’s provided by the host.
6. An easy backup utility to backup our database or restore it would also be desirable but is not required.
