I want my customers to be able to submit classified listings, but I only want the classifieds to be viewable on the back-end. They will be published in a monthly newsletter. Is 68Classifieds overkill for this type of application? Is it possible to hide the other portions of 68Classifieds and only make the posting & payment options available to front-end users?
Yes this is possible to do in multiple ways. One way is to to simply modify your layout.tpl file so people can place ads only and perhaps you want a main home and contact page left on your site too. If you want to go further (i.e. in case people know that say category.php exists) then you can disable the other pages so they return 404 error files. I don't even bother to do this (here is an example - french property for sale) . In this example I keep a couple of extra pages , the home page and a contact page. The link to latest is actually something special because it is showing listings from 3 other sites. All I would need to do in order to emulate your requirement would be to place the latest link with a 'place an ad' link. If you wanted to use the front-end for people at the end of the month to look at the listings like a regualr 68C site then you can use the manage usergroups functionality to say only admin can view those things. You would then just give them the urls to the cateogries or again modify the layout.tpl file to only show certain links if the user is logged in and an admin. All fairly straightforward to do. Basically a full system but for admin users only otherwise a simple place an ad with a couple of extra pages.
