Help Creating a Q-and-A for a computer-illiterate client

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posternb

New Member
My client is an artist; she makes art for children. She is also a retired child-psychiatrist, and wants to incorporate an advice column for kids into the website.

For most of my clients, the answer would be obvious and easy... just having a specific 'Contact' link to send her questions, and she could just create new articles within a given category, which would appear in the Advice Column, cutting-and-pasting the questions from the email into the articles. Simple, right?

The problem is this: this client is the most computer-illiterate old lady I've ever met. To illustrate: she sent me an email with text for the site, and asked me to send it back to her so that she'd have a copy. I swear it's true.

So I just don't now whether she can even handle much back-end management, and I doubt she can even handle cutting-and-pasting the question into the body of the wysiwyg editor, let alone adding blockquote classes to divs and whatnot.

So, I was thinking the best bet might be some kind of function that allows her to log into the front-end (preferably), it shows her new questions submitted by site visiters, lets her fill in the answer, push a button, and the whole thing will be automatically published to the site. I suppose that some back-end management is also nice, like the ability to sort, unpublish, etc.

I wondered if Fabrik can do it (I've used it to make a simple form, but I didn't pay for the manual till about 5 minutes ago, so I don't know the full extent to which it can be used). I am pretty sure it can, but I have no idea where to begin, and the newly acquired manual is somewhat intimidating to a fabrik-newb like me.

So, any suggestions on the best way to approach this with Fabrik?

Cheers!
 
version

Well, the one form I created for a different site was using 2.0b2 on J!1.5.x. I've only used it in the one site, and only the one time.

I haven't really started the process on this site yet, till I have a plan of attack. However, I am trying to keep the site totally native 1.5, so I'd like to still stick with v2.x of Fabrik.

BTW, I did create a weak little flowchart of the overall process I imagine the final "application" to take. Have a looksie.

Thanks!

Leland
 

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OK.

It all looks do-able, although adding stuff to com_content would require some custom PHP work.

Rob and I were talking last night about providing easier ways to integrate Fabrik data into J! content. Let me think on this, and talk to Rob. This is a fairly classic example of what we were talking about, so we may come up with a built-in way of pushing Fabrik content into J! content for you.

Bump this thread in a day or two if you haven't heard back from me.

-- hugh
 
cheesegrits said:
It all looks do-able, although adding stuff to com_content would require some custom PHP work.

Rob and I were talking last night about providing easier ways to integrate Fabrik data into J! content. Let me think on this, and talk to Rob. This is a fairly classic example of what we were talking about, so we may come up with a built-in way of pushing Fabrik content into J! content for you.
Click to expand...
Have you guys heard any of the talk about Joomla getting a new kind of content handling system, so that everything goes into the com_content tables, (or equivalent subsystem)? The rationale behind this is so that ALL content on the site would be searchable by the search components...
 
Thanks for the update, Hugh... I'm really curious to see what you do.

In the meantime, I don't need a step-by-step, but apart from making the various forms, what parts of the manual should I be looking at to learn how to deal with the other aspects of this?

Cheers,
Leland
 
You should pretty much be able to do it by the seat of your pants. Just kick the tires and light the fires.

You really just need one form. You can put the question and answer on the same form, and use the access control at the element level so only She sees the 'answer'. The public only see the question box, and whatever info you want to collect from them - email, name, whatever. And probably a database join element to com_category to show/select the category the question is for (you can use a 'where' clause if you want to restrict which cats show up).

You'll also want another, hidden element for the content ID we'll be creating with the custom PHP form submission script. What that will do will check to see if this form has the content ID set. If not, and the 'answer' field is not empty, then we know we have to create a new com_content item, and save it's id in this form's data. If there is a content ID set, we know we need to update that content rather than create a new one.

But don't worry about that last bit, just create the basic form first. Set the 'record in database' option and give it a table name. You'll then automatically have all the submitted forms in a table.

We can then use table filters to allow her to see 'unanswered' and 'unanswered', sorting by category, etc.

-- hugh
 
this is a perfect roadmap for me to use to learn; not too vague, not too detailed. Thank You!!!

One more question (till I think of another)... Is there a way to specify that the question and answer (or any other form element being used) be wrapped in specific tags with specific classes, ids, etc?

Thanks again for such quick and awesome replies. Man, the reviews at the JED don't lie.

Cheers.
 
All our default form templates are CSS styled. We have overall classes for things like labels and element data, and everything has it's own ID. So you can very easily restyle by customizing the template CSS.

NOTE that if you are going to modify a template at all, you first need to clone it - there's a FAQ posting about cloning templates. It's specific to 1.0.x, but applies to 2.0, just that the template folders are in different places. Comes down to copying and renaming a folder.

If you don't clone your template before editing, next time you upgrade Fabrik, your changes will get blown away.

So ... now you can go write us a glowing review. I'm trying to get our average up to 4 stars. Although maybe you should wait till you've actually built something ... you may hate us again by the time you've done that. ;D

-- hugh
 
cheesegrits said:
So ... now you can go write us a glowing review. I'm trying to get our average up to 4 stars. Although maybe you should wait till you've actually built something ... you may hate us again by the time you've done that. ;D

-- hugh
Click to expand...

I just left a review (I think I did one in the past, but it let me do it again, so perhaps my past review was for Fab 1).

I did, however, have to rate Fabrik 2.5 stars, since I still can't get the ID to show in the email: http://fabrikar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7999

I'm just kidding, of course. ;)
 
PS....also noticed some disgruntled Fabrik "user" (and I use gigantic quotes around "user") went through and said each possible review was not helpful and said each negative review was...probably spent more time trying to show their displeasure than they did trying to learn to use Fabrik. :)
 
Yeah, I noticed that, too. Sad, really.

We really should encourage more of our gruntled users to post nice reviews, to offset the couple of disgruntled ones we've had recently. Someone gives us 0 stars because we recommend a PHP memory size of 64MB was a little harsh, I thought.

-- hugh
 
Well, to be fair, Bill Gates did say that 640K should be enough for anyone... :)

I think I had 64M in my C-64, right? :)
 
Ah, now you done got me going ...

I started out on DEC PDP-11's, known back then as "mini computers", about the size of two full 19" rack mount cabinets, with a massive 32K of memory.

I even worked on systems with 16K of woven core mat memory (literally woven by little old ladies with copper wire and graphite rings), but those were avionics systems which needed to be hardened against EMP, and back then, core mat was the only EMP proof game in town. Coding was done in octal based machine code, transferred and loaded from ... you guessed it ... punched paper tape.

On the whole, I prefer coding in PHP with Komodo on a machine with 2GB of memory. But I do miss those big clunky TeleType 22's with the paper tape punch on the side.

This also triggers memories of playing tunes on the 132 column band printers in the server room by carefully formatting a document (so 12 rows of &'s would play a middle C for 1 second). Playing Happy Birthday for the print operator took about a 2" stack of fanfold paper.

We got busted before we could complete our master work, the first 20 seconds or so of Bach's Brandenberg Concerto #3, arranged for Four Band Printers. Apparently this wasn't what the British tax payers were paying for.

-- hugh
 
"TeleTypes?" We had these in the military; a friend of mine fixed them. Nice. ;)

My first was the TRS-80, followed by the Timex Sinclair. I think I paid $19.95 for the Timex at Fay's Drugstore...16K as well...membrane keyboard...used the old black tape drives with the big handle in the front (the standard cassette tape player everyone had back then). :) I used to press play to load up a little blackjack and then went to make a sandwich and get a drink, perhaps watch a little tv...took about 15 minutes to load.

http://oldcomputers.net/ts1000.html

I had the lower model, of course! I didn't need that much horsepower back then! :)

[edit] appears to have been a British company that made them, so perhaps you are familar with them? ...or did you guys dump them in America to help maintain your competitive advantage while we waited for the tape to load? :)

"In 1980, British company Sinclair released their ZX80 computer for $199.95."
 
Bump

cheesegrits said:
OK.

It all looks do-able, although adding stuff to com_content would require some custom PHP work.

Rob and I were talking last night about providing easier ways to integrate Fabrik data into J! content. Let me think on this, and talk to Rob. This is a fairly classic example of what we were talking about, so we may come up with a built-in way of pushing Fabrik content into J! content for you.

Bump this thread in a day or two if you haven't heard back from me.

-- hugh
Click to expand...


Bump. Hi Hugh... My client has asked me to start working on this again, so I wanted to see how things were progressing. Please advise.

Cheers.
 
I think the whole thing could be handled with Fabrik. The front end of the advice column, where users browse existing categories / Q&A's, and submit new questions. And the 'author only' front end, where she views new questions and answers them.

It's getting late, I don't have time to give you detailed advice right now. I'll check back in tomorrow.

-- hugh
 
Hi Hugh,

You actually already gave me some pretty good advice on implementing 90% of the project in Fabrik (see other posts in this thread before the whole tangent that lead to page #2), but were also saying that you were looking into adding a new function to Fabrik that would allow us to convert the Q&A into com_content articles. Lemme know. Otherwise, how can I show the Q&A in Fabrik without it being able to be further edited by viewers?
 
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