[AnAlienHolakres3]

Hello people, this tutorial describes functionality of Pligg Team Addon.



Is it good for you? PTA (Pligg Team Addon) is suitable for every company or school where teamwork is presented. In the other words if you need teams, tasks and team members working on their tasks (which can be connected with Pligg links!) this is addon for you.


Overall functionality of PTA
- Teams
- Team members
- Tasks

Teams:
- Each of logged in Pligg users can create its own Team, there is no limit on count of teams (see attachment no.1)
- Team has some general information such as name,category,objectives, publicity and specific information

Spacific information includes:

1. team members and tasks.
2. team Shoutbox (ajax based minichat).
3. team rss (ajax based preview + casual rss feed containing team activity)(see attachment no.4)

Good to know:
- Team publicity can be selected to private, in this case only team members can access this team
- When user create team, he becomes team creator (team administrator) automatically. Only team administrator can delete team and customize team settings (see attachment no.2)

Team member:
-Team member can be added and deleted by team creator only. (see attachment no.3)
-Team members are allowed to write task comments ,sending messages in shoutbox and rate other team member tasks.

Good to know:
- Non-Team member is authorized to access team only when it is public
- Non-Team member is allowed to sending messages in shoutbox only
- Team creator cannot be deleted

It is recommended to make Team public, let users to join and select specific users when they write message to Team shoutbox. After team is complete make it private (if you do not want to share information).

If you delete team member, all his tasks (and its content) are gone. Remember that.

Tasks:

Task can be created by team administrator only. Task has some general attributes:
- name
- description
- deadline
- task worker (only 1 team member)

These are fundamental and cannot be empty when task is created.

When task is created there are more task attributes:
(see attachement no.6)
- task description contains task creation date and time
- task worker - his name
- task deadline - if it is red then it was reached
- task completeness (in %), can be modified by task worker only
- task status :sufficient task rating and insufficient task rating
- task rating - 0-10, task worker cannot rate its own task,
- task files - only zip archive, 3 latest revisions are stored and availible for download, maximum filesize is 5MB
- task related links - this is core of connection between teams and pligg. You can add link to task easily - on upcoming or published page in every link there is a label "insert to team task",see attachment preview no.5
- task comments

All these information are on this page. Some can be displayed when you roll-over them (deadline, rating - users , status..) or when you click them (uploading,downloading files, completeness, writing comment,rating..).


Good to know:
- Task general information can be changed by team creator.
- If you delete task all its content including comments,files and related links are deleted also (please note links are not deleted, only connection between link and task is deleted)

Live DEMO: Pligg Beta 9 / Published News
(note you have to be registered to access teams!, you can use login: alien password:alien )

[tbones]

It looks to me as an excellent mode with a lot of well-thought messages. Even more kudos that you´ve coded it on your own!

I´m not sure whether I fully understood the module, so these are some thoughts/questions of mine:

I really like the combination of versioning and rating!
- Is the rating based on the last revision or an average of votes based on different versions? If it´s an average maybe you start a rating for every revision.

Do you plan to add some sort of difference analysis for revisions like Wikipedia some day?

What is the use of the team category?

P.S.: The integration of a shoutbox is also excellent! I didn´t know so far that there exists a logged chat, called shoutbox

[AnAlienHolakres3]

Originally Posted by tbones

It looks to me as an excellent mode with a lot of well-thought messages. Even more kudos that you´ve coded it on your own!

I´m not sure whether I fully understood the module, so these are some thoughts/questions of mine:

I really like the combination of versioning and rating!
- Is the rating based on the last revision or an average of votes based on different versions? If it´s an average maybe you start a rating for every revision.

Do you plan to add some sort of difference analysis for revisions like Wikipedia some day?

What is the use of the team category?

P.S.: The integration of a shoutbox is also excellent! I didn´t know so far that there exists a logged chat, called shoutbox

Thanks man.
1) Rating and versioning
It is important to know subject of rating is the task not taskfiles. User is allowed to change his own rating if task quality was improved.
Task quality = quality of task files + related links + related comments.

Task rating is average of all user´s rating, i.e. member A rate 5, member B rate 10 then average rating is 7.5.

2) Category
In Live demo there is only one category, but if your Pligg site has many categories then it is great thing. My primary site VÅ*Elink / Schválené novinky has many categories - school subjects. And for every school subject there can be created team, you can filter that. To be simple it is for better identification.

Difference analysis...i will think about that but....i do not think it would be in near future.

Shoutbox - it was an idea of my friend...implementation was quite tricky but it works now and thats important

Versioning...when you install...uuuh...implement this addon you can specify how many revisions should be kept in database, in this tut i do not want to be technical.

[tbones]

Originally Posted by AnAlienHolakres3

Thanks man.

You´re welcome. Good work deserves it.

Originally Posted by AnAlienHolakres3

1) Rating and versioning
It is important to know subject of rating is the task not taskfiles. User is allowed to change his own rating if task quality was improved.
Task quality = quality of task files + related links + related comments.

Ok, so the user has to check whether anything changed. If that happens she/he has to decide whether the changes still deserve the given rating.

Originally Posted by AnAlienHolakres3

2) Category
In Live demo there is only one category, but if your Pligg site has many categories then it is great thing. My primary site VŠElink / Schválené novinky has many categories - school subjects. And for every school subject there can be created team, you can filter that. To be simple it is for better identification.

I understand: You get an idea of the rough focus of a team and it allows to group teams by that focus.

I´m doing also in education: I use a Pligg instance as electronic portfolio (
Developing a Teaching Portfolio - not my work, just an english information). Stories are pieces of that portfolio. It´s a product-oriented portfolio. Using your mod with revisions could be a first step towards a process-oriented portfolio.

I´m pretty interested in your shoutbox because I need some sort of a shoutbox but with a rating possibility for every message (part of reflexion). Therefore I thought about an auto-refresh for the Pligg comments.

Do you think you could implement your shoutbox refresh code into comments?

[tbones]

Regarding your poll:
I would provide the mod as it is at the moment (with this functionality and the remaining display errors) for free.

All improvements should be provided as a paid module to acknowledge your efforts. If this is out of your interests a free module just with upload (as the users personal folder), revision control and voting would also be fine.

P.S.: Is the upload restricted to file types?

[AnAlienHolakres3]

1) Shoutbox and comments - if you would like shoutbox for every comment page i do not think it is complicated, instead of team shoutbox you can call it "comment shoutbox", code customization about 20%

2) File types are restricted to be ZIP archives only.

3) it is not possible to do something like "payed update service",because it is simply payed support and this is not our effort. If Pligg comunity desires to be this addon free I will provide it for free as a long detailed tutorial with providing neccessary files.

[tbones]

Originally Posted by AnAlienHolakres3

1) Shoutbox and comments - if you would like shoutbox for every comment page i do not think it is complicated, instead of team shoutbox you can call it "comment shoutbox", code customization about 20%

I guess I wrote to unclear: Since I would like the users to vote for every single message/comment in standard Pligg I just need a way to auto-refresh the comment display (see this post: http://forums.pligg.com/suggestions/...html#post55305). I thought that your shoutbox refresh code would be suitable for that.

Originally Posted by AnAlienHolakres3

2) File types are restricted to be ZIP archives only.

Is this for storage reasons? I would prefer a free choice of file types and a quota per team.

Originally Posted by AnAlienHolakres3

3) it is not possible to do something like "payed update service",because it is simply payed support and this is not our effort. If Pligg comunity desires to be this addon free I will provide it for free as a long detailed tutorial with providing neccessary files.

I was wrong with your motivation: I thought you want to make the module commercial in its full functionality and possibly offer a free version with restricted functionality. Biggest thanks to you that you plan to release everything for free !!!