Does anyone know an open source solution for a client extranet?

[gregsmith]

Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone knew any good client extranet web app (preferably in php of course ;) )

Thanks

[dalecosp]

Lemme guess, the one you're writing now? ;)

Big question. You might wanna give some more specifics.

[gregsmith]

Funnily enough, I'm not writing one at the moment - I'm looking for a ready open source solution to save me HAVING to write one. :D

What I'm after is basically a way of managing a staging extranet for a web based company - so customers can login and view stuff relating to them (current projects, ftp details etc.). Kinda like a customer control panel or portal.

[Elizabeth]

I've used basecamp (http://basecamphq.com) in the past, and while it's not free, it has a nice GUI for the clients and it's pretty robust.

The only downfall to using it is if you need to fileshare large files (>10 Mb)... it can do it but you have to do a workaround using FTP and it's not very user friendly for non-FTP-savvy clients.

Otherwise you can do project collaboration, file sharing, version control, share calendars and notes and keep track of deadlines and who's supposed to be doing what. You can also set up different permissions for users so your client's clients will only see what pertains to them.

[gregsmith]

Thanks for the reply elizabeth, I'm already using the free alternative to basecamp called activeCollab (http://www.activecollab.com) (which I can massively recommend!)

Maybe I can do what I want within activeCollab for my clients.

I think I'd rather have something very simple - it's almost just to protect a client's staging folder (with staging version of their site in) with a username and password, although some sort of welcome page with their details would be good. Maybe I can still do this easily with activeCollab/basecamp. I thought someone might have built something for this purpose as it's a very common requirement for web based companies, but if not maybe I'll build it myself ;)

[Elizabeth]

ActiveCollab - yes! I knew I'd heard of that before but I couldn't remember it for the life of me. I've heard people talking about that and I took a quick look at it but never tried it out. From what I understand that's a pretty cool system as well.