One-To-Many member-to-articles relationship

Question

We are new to Expression Engine and could maybe use some help from anyone who has built a few sites using this CMS.

We have a small dashboard system where users log in and read articles that are submitted from other authors. We are wanting to have a form which allows a member to chose which categories of articles he would like to be on his home page when he logs in. Then we'd like to figure out how to actually create that home page so that only the categories of articles that the user has chosen are visible.

From a DB standpoint this seems to be a one to many relationship between a member and categories, but we don't have a clear idea how to accomplish this inside of EE (without raw PHP/queries), especially using the Member module, since it isn't a channel and doesn't seem to allow creating relationships in the member custom fields.

We looked at creating a custom field for every category type, but there are about 95, and as we add or remove them, it would be extremely cumbersome to try to keep up with them all. Even if we did we still aren't sure how to connect 1 member to many categories or many entries via a category.

We'll update the question later to add some of the code we (if any) that we've come up with

Answer 1

In short, there isn't going to be a built in way to handle this. That isn't to say however that this can't be handled with some modules that are already out there. Let me ask you this. When you have users logging in, are they logging in to Expression Engine itself's backend, or the login system that you have created on a public facing website.