Hello,

I am new to the developer forums. I am not sure if this is the correct section to post this in, so please forgive me if this post is miscategorized.

I work for a non-profit ethnic media organization. We are currently using a very outdated and poorly-built CRM that also includes an ethnic media directory. We use the CRM to keep records of all of our partner media outlets and their associated contacts. We sell subscriptions to the ethnic media directory on our website.

The ethnic media directory grants subscribers read-only access to view certain records in the CRM (ethnic media outlets and their associated contacts). Directory subscribers register for an account through our website and are able to log in to the directory using that account through a web-based portal which is separate from our internal CRM login page.

We recently began building a new CRM using SalesForce. Our goal is to switch over from our old CRM to SalesForce. We have imported all of our records from the old system and are pretty much finished setting up the new CRM, but we have not yet built a replacement for our old ethnic media directory. I am curious to know if anyone has any suggestions on how to go about doing this.

I've read a few things about VisualForce and Apex, and I am curious to know if I could use these to build a new ethnic media directory that grants subscribers a form of limited access to certain records in our SalesForce org. The system would need to be able to handle registering and authenticating subscribers, providing read-only access to certain records and so on through a web-based portal interface.

We are currently using a free non-profit edition of SalesForce, so we are limited to 10 user licenses. The ethnic media directory would ideally use a single "API/read-only user" account to access SalesForce. Ideally, I would like for the directory to reference the Contacts object for registering and authenticating subscribers, as we could have a special contact record type for subscribers with an encrypted field to store their password and a date field to store their subscription expiration date.

I'm fairly new to SalesForce in general and I have no prior experience working with VisualForce, Apex, etc. I'd like to know if there's a way to do this with VisualForce/Apex and if so, how do I go about building it? Will I need to use PHP instead? Please let me know.

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my post.