Workflow and Collaboration, Questions and Suggestions

Monday 15 September 2008 4:36:25 pm

Hi there interested readers and eZ Crew :-)

Some of this is probably best suited to the suggestions forum, but I didn't want to confuse things with separate threads, as all this is to do with workflow and collaboration, so I'll post it all here and hope that most of my questions/suggestions have some validity and can be answered :-)

Having done some extensive searching in the forums, there are a great number of orphan questions regarding workflows and collaboration in eZ Publish. So, I'd like to re-visit some of these with regard to my recent foray in Workflows:

I'm using eZ 4.0.1rc2 on Linux (FC5) using PHP5.2.5, MySQL 4.1.6 and sendmail 8.13.7.

1). There's no control for deleting items in the collaboration list when those objects have been deleted themselves. Should they not be allowed to be deleted until moderated or should the deletion process itself even be incorporated into a workflow?

2). Items listed under the My Profile --> My Pending Items list are not editable and need to be approved before editing can take place as normal. However, they are listed as drafts (They have a version number in the list), so I'd have thought that you could edit them. Why not then?

3). In the admin interface the collaboration list shows different detail about content objects awaiting approval than does the "My Pending Items" view in the website interface (ezwebin). Would be better if the collaboration list in both was consistent.

4). Can the Collaboration list be made available in the website view, not just restricted to the admin interface? I guess this is simply a permissions/template override issue right? I would have thought however, this would be default behaviour as some users with approval permissions, wouldn't otherwise ned to ever visit the 'admin' interface, except for this.

5). Group Tree for "inbox": Mine shows "Inbox (43)" What is this? Can it be documented somewhere? How can this list be cleared?

6). Suggest each item in the collaboration list has an "approve" and "deny" button/link/icon in the listing itself <b>as well as</b> having these buttons in the GUI upon clicking each entry.

Alongside these queries, I have submitted some bugs and enhancements that are relevant to workflows and collaboration that future visitors to this thread might find useful:

http://issues.ez.no/IssueView.php?Id=13617
http://issues.ez.no/IssueView.php?Id=13618
http://issues.ez.no/IssueView.php?Id=13619
http://issues.ez.no/IssueView.php?Id=13620
http://issues.ez.no/IssueView.php?Id=13621

Thanks for reading all :-)
Russ

Russell Michell, Wellington, New Zealand.
We're building! http://www.theruss.com/blog/
I'm on Twitter: http://twitter.com/therussdotcom

Believe nothing, consider everything.

Wednesday 17 September 2008 6:14:35 pm

Hi André,

>2) you will only get problems if you try to delete them.

Sure, but if this is the case, then they shouldn't be permitted to be deleted. Using this logic, no software bugs would ever be fixed as it allows developers free reign to say things like "You shouldn't press the back button when using x/y application" - never mind that users <b>will</b> press the back button and load of other things that the developer never envisaged.

As for the HTML in email issue, here are my settings for override/site.ini.append.php

[TemplateSettings]
Debug=enabled
DevelopmentMode=enabled
ShowXHTMLCode=disabled
ShowUsedTemplates=disabled
TemplateCache=disabled
TemplateCompile=disabled

[MailSettings]
Transport=sendmail
SenderHost=localhost
ContentType=text/plain
AdminEmail=me@my-co.co.nz
EmailSender=me@my-co.co.nz

With the above settings and when I approve content via a workflow moderator, the email is sent as plain-text (as per the settings above) and I see the HTML comments in the message body. Changing ContentType to text/html, they disappear (of course). I have used both Lotus Notes and my webmail (Roundcube) to view these messages.

Are there some other settings that might affect this, or is this a bug?

> Look at the alternatives instead, eZappove2 extension should work a lot better on things like this.
Sure I will do, thanks for the pointer. But I have to say though that it strikes me as a little odd that extensions are needed to perform system tasks and operations that I would consider to be core functionality. It's almost like such extensions are 'patches' without actually being official patches.

Sorry, I don't mean to rant, and I will go check out the extensions.

With regard to 4). I changed the templates/user/edit.tpl file and added a link to the collaboration list. As long as that user has Collaboration privileges enough to see the page, it works.

Any comments on the rest of my points? I would really like to know what "Group Tree for "inbox":" means and how it might be used - practically I mean :-)

Thanks for your help André :-)
Russ

Russell Michell, Wellington, New Zealand.
We're building! http://www.theruss.com/blog/
I'm on Twitter: http://twitter.com/therussdotcom

Believe nothing, consider everything.