Themes

Posted by Torsten Fabricius 26 Jul 2015 03:18 GMT-0000

 Hello NextGenBassMusic,

I think, it would not be a good idea to rename features like "File Galleries", "Trackers" or "Articles" to meet an individual use case, as they meet general needs.

Example "File Galleries"

This is a feature to generally store files in an arbitrary number of optionally nested directory alike structures.

In your specific use case you want to store "only" or "mainly" downloadable forms and thus name the whole feature "Forms".

What if you later wanted to use to "File Galleries" to store images or pdf-files with informations or other kinds of files? Would you expect to find "images" in a feature called "Forms"?

This makes no sense.

Better you create a navigation menu and label the menu item "Forms" whilstbeing a link to the actual file gallery where you store the downloadable forms and provide for your customers.

Next and even better step

Use a wikipage named "Forms" or "Forms to download".

On this wikipage you can put a wikiplugin listing either the content of a file gallery (autoupdating) or specific files or all files wiuth a certain category etc.

See here PluginFiles

So only the administrators and editors would have to know the deeper functions of Tiki (what they SHOULD know), but your endusers and customers just get a menu-link to forms and find the forms on a page called "Forms".

This is much much easier for everybody than to rename a general feature to a very specific and likely temporary applying use case.

Similar with Trackers

You can use "Trackers" to create an employees directory. But you can use trackers for a sheer endless number of different things aswell. and likely you wiull start to do that one day.

The standart Tracker view is very administrator centric and likely to confuse endusers and customers.

Avoid to let non-admins and non-skilled-editors to any need to view the trackers directly.

Create tracker forms and tracker-tables with Tracker related wikiplugins on wikipages and set the Trackers to limit visibility to administrators - non-tracker-admins shall be send to the proper wikipages which represent the enduser frontend.

You can setup a wikipage called "Empoyee Directory" and put a wikiplugin trackerlist on it (or use the advanced wikiplugin list).

There is no reason to rename features. You simply want to create a UX for non-tecchie endusers, which is just simply possible by configuring Tiki.

Another hint:

As this is a company project, you should calculate the time for setting up yourself as company's staff (time equals employees wages quals costs).

A company should always consider to hire a consultant to support the own staff. A consultant can help you setting up and configure, do general consulting and service design with you. A consultant saves you time and money as he/she knows Tiki well enough (ok, most of us do, but maybe not all of us. so you must have the magic touch to find the right one).

Please never forgetthat FreeOpenSource does not mean to get everything free of charge. The software is free and for company the biggest financial aset is not to get services for free, but to save a lot on not buying the software and not having to pay licence fees - especialy no per-user based fees.
Still you need consultants and traiuners for FreeOpenSource same as for Proprietary Software.

Conclusion:
Don't expect free beer, but save money by gainig freedom. A good consultant helps your company for that.

Best regards,
Torsten