I've been given the dubious task of trying to figure out about what a project group should plan for time/money wise, if they want to go down this path...

They currently have a largish (400 page) book they print every year - with summaries of laws, appendixes of the full text of the laws, and then each country the laws apply to has their own page with their own summaries and exclusions.

I've suggested they build it out as a wiki - to keep it updated, and have an online presence (doing away with the book altogether). However, they are requesting some functionality that I do not think is supported by most plug-and-play wiki backends...

They are asking for an interactive/searchable/reportable database front-end that we can host on a web server - so users can do complex queries and set up custom reports of the data. Part of that, would be the ability to have it spit out formatted pages (server generated PDF? or in browser) of the query, up to and including the entire database of final/approved content - so that people could essentially print their own full book (or chapters, etc.), without me having to layout the pages for them.

Is there are CMS that would do this already? Would this have to be bespoke?

Is anyone out there willing to talk through this, and try to get me a ballpark on time and money, or point me in the right direction?

Much appreciated.

I'm going to guess this will have to be bespoke. Even if you found a CMS that was capable of doing those things it would probably end up taking even more time to get it functioning the way you/they would like. In my opinion anyway...

It doesn't sound super complicated though, I guess it kind of depends on the details of the "complex reports" and stuff like that. I've built a few things that sound similar. One was a database of drugs and their interactions and descriptions and all the other associated info that was used to generate a book. That may have been a little more simple than this though because there weren't a lot of custom reports to be generated.

Thanks TRM. Yah, I had a feeling it was probably bespoke.

Unfortunately, we don't have any true needs assessment or guideline on how complex their usability requirements will eventually get.

But of course, they still expect me to give them a projected timeline and price tag.

Broadly, I'm thinking 3 months, including entry of the content.. and roughly 40K. But Honestly, I have no basis for those numbers.

That's probably reasonable. Of course it depends upon the flexibility they will need in the reports. From my experience the trickiest part is handling any complicated formatting/layout when dynamically generating pdf's.

If you guys end up going through with it and are looking for a developer let me know. As I said, I've done some similar projects.

Damn if you had asked sooner I could've told you exact numbers, company I work for just priced out redoing out database management system and website for the publications we do. I'm not sure about timeframe but I think 3 months is not enough, I know it wouldn't be for my company anyways.

Try asking The Real Me he does a lot of work in this area and might be able to give you some figures.

Right now we use something called BookManager. It does everything you probably would want it to with a bit of customization but its really slow.

TRM -

You wouldn't happen to have any example sites I could show the team - especially anything at all similar to what I outlined above?

Sure, I'm just heading out for the day but I will try to pm you some examples tonight. If not tonight, I will get them to you in the morning.

Thanks!

Awesome. Thanks!