We are developing an application for our customer that helps businesses to effectively plan and track their business changes.
Our application has three core elements, creating initiatives, capture their impacts and defining their actions.
One of the requirement in our product is for the stakeholders of these initiatives to be able to communicate with each other on these initiatives. So be able to like the initiatives, put comments, mention other users, notify each other when an action was taken and so on.
We are evaluating GetStream for this requirement and trying to understand if it best fits into our requirement or not.
We have spent enough time reading the GetStream REST documentation, the core concepts of how feeds and activities are designed. From initial understanding it looks as if the activities are tightly coupled to a user's feed or timeline vs what we need is to be able to add activities against the Initiatives and have multiple users communicate on the same initiative.
Our frontend is built in ReactJs, we have spent about 2-3 days evaluating react-activity-feed package.
We need help to understand if GetStream best fits to our model or not.
Appreciate all the help. Looking forward to a response.
This is a use case that Stream feeds are well fitted for. They are very customizable. It sounds like if you're using React then you'll need to ask us to make one of your groups global read or read/write. This will decouple the feed from being tied to one user and anyone can read or write to it. Email me at support#getstream with your AppID and the feed group which you'd like to change, along with whether you'd like to be read or read/write when the time comes and I can do this for you.
Best,
Stephen
Related
I am trying to create a forum app using Django as a backend and React as a front end. I want to find out how many people have visited a post created by a user so that I can store as views and list the posts according to popularity.
I am just a student and I have no experience with live websites, so I'm wondering if it is okay to just save a user at componentdidmount life cycle? But I'm afraid it'd make the same user be counted as many as he visits and the post creator will be able to increase his post's popularity by just spamming his website.
I would suggest you implement this on the backend, not the front end. I don't know Django well, but there should be some way to know whether that particular post is getting requested. At that point, you'll want to increment the counter for that post.
The problem of course is determining which "views" count as real views. Was it the poster? Was it a robot? Was it a spider? Was it a scraper? Was it the same person who is not the poster viewing it many times?
I wouldn't say this last part is not an easy thing to implement, and would probably take some trial and error before finding the right conditions to get your metrics "right".
As #Mike suggests above, there are many analytics packages which use sophisticated algorithms to determine "realness", and you may be able to use this data. My understanding is that you want to actually apply the data to sorting and UI for your app, not just view it on the dashboard of your analytics tool. I've never tried to look for one that supports an API to discover what you're interested in programmatically, but they all probably allow you do download structured data about your traffic. The problem with the latter approach is that creates a delay and a manual step (always something to try to avoid imo).
Ok, so about a year ago I wrote a web app that helps organize appointments for my dads company. He now "couldn't do business without it". I have decided that I want to build a SAAS subscription model out of it and open it up to the public.
It's currently built on codeigniter and php which I do not think is a good fit for a SAAS version. I am planning on rebuiling it from scratch in laravel 4 and using stripe as a payment gateway.
My concern is how best to handle the database / application structure for more than one client. Currently, it just serves the one business and is very un-abstract and is specific to my dads companies needs. I need it to be able to handle different data depending on what the business who uses it does.
I have looked into multi-tenancy but i'm not sure this is right for this. I am thinking that a 'gmail' style approach would be better. One app / domain that after login the user will see their customised dashboard and only their data.
Before I get stuck in with the coding I need to work out how best to handle multiple 'accounts' on the one database. I do not want to create a table for each user, nor a database for each user.
I guess my question is can anybody point me in the right direction for how best to handle a monthly payment subscription in Laravel? It's not so much the code that I'm stuggling with, rather what exactly I would need to build to handle charging the customer each month and denying them access if billing failed etc.
Thanks
You are in for a lot of reading and a ton of work!
First of all, let's completely ignore the billing aspect of this for now — at the end of the day that portion of the application is really fairly trivial. Take a page out of 37signals Rework (page 93 and 94) and launch your product with a 30 day free trial before you even begin implementing it (you should know how to implement it by then).
Second, why do you think that "gmail" doesn't use multi-tenancy, URI structure tells nothing about the underlying database structure. I'm fairly confident they aren't cloning a database schema for every one of their customers. Therefore you've probably answered your own question — you want to implement multi-tenancy.
You're going to want to abstract your database (and application architecture), and honestly there is no better resource to help you on your way to doing that than Taylor Otwell's (creator of Laravel) book Laravel: From Apprentice To Artisan. His book is not for beginners, and by the time you're done reading it you should probably be able to answer this question for yourself.
You are not going to be creating a table or a database for each user, you aren't even going to be creating one for each organization. Instead you'll be creating abstract database structure in code, which will pull your users data out of the database.
Think about checking for permission to access an organization as another layer of user authentication. On every request you'll be checking to see if that user can access a particular organization. You'll likely also check to ensure that organization is still active (did it expire because they didn't pay?) this will again happen on every request and likely with a filter within laravel.
This really leads to the next very important factor of developing a SaaS application.
I don't know about you, but I'm paranoid, and I couldn't sleep well at night if I wasn't sure that user number 4506 couldn't see the data of an organization that he doesn't belong to. The only really good way to ensure this is through unit testing, which I'd highly suggest learning if you haven't already.
The best way to do this within Laravel 4 is to read Jeffrey Way's book Laravel Testing Decoded. This book is extremely advanced, but still easy to understand if you have a good grasp of the fundamentals.
Last but not least, the number one thing is get involved in the community — the easiest way I'd suggest doing that is idling on the #laravel IRC channel (freenode). Ask some questions, maybe answer some questions, everyone in the channel is very nice and responsive.
You are definitely in for an adventure, don't be afraid to ask questions and make mistakes. Good luck.
As a rough overview, I would have a clients table, and a subscriptions table. Any other data that needs storing such as contacts, or appointments, can be associated using foreign keys to the client table.
In laravel, you can use the ORM to get the currently logged in client, and then through a relationship, fetch appointments and contacts belonging to them.
There are some useful tools for laravel at cartalyst.com, including sentry and sentry-social for user auth, and integrating user accounts with facebook/google/twitter, etc.
Stripe will allow you to configure recurring payments, and will notify you via web hooks each time there is a payment attempt. you can log these in the payments table, and associate them with a user/client. you can use this to keep track of who has paid, and how recently.
Also, bear in mind that you may not want to cancel the account immediately on failed payment.
Stripe will reattempt, and it may be that your best response is after it is two or three days late, or you get an invalid card notification,to get in touch with the client and prompt them to update their payment details.
It may also be an opportunity to check when they last logged in.
If it was over a month ago you can credit them with a free month, and remind them of how much your app can do for them.
By doing this, you may be able to get people to continue using (and paying) for something they had forgotten they had subscribed to.
I'm still sort of new to CakePHP, and I've presently created and deployed one (rather complex) application using it. It has full user and group support and I took the time to get the access tables working and everything.
Now, I'm creating a separate application. I initially just created a brand new CakePHP installation, but I later realized that I wanted to authenticate users based on my first app. They currently use different data sources. I understand that there are a couple of ways this could be accomplished, with various pros and cons. Do I:
Keep them separate, add a data source to my extension application, and port my user authentication code over?
Keep them separate, process logins with the first application, and somehow share that data with the second using a communication protocol?
Combine them into a single data source and accept the added complexity in my app?
Something entirely different?
I'm using CakePHP to create both sites, which will be running on the same host/hostname, and connecting to the same MySQL server. Users are always stored/created on the main application, and just need to be passively accessed by the second app.
Honestly it sounds to me like you could bring them together with ease. Your reasons for keeping them separate sound to me like you could just keep them separate pieces of the one program.
For example the application I work on for a living does many of these things. Users can register, they also have access to a calendar of events, job postings, recent news, and about 25 other modules. They are just different parts of the program.
You could have one application that has a route like /users/register which the users controller takes care of registration. Then you can have another part of your application that routes to /calendar/.... where the calendar controller will take care of the calendar logic. If you need separate calendars for students and faculty you could have routes like /faculty/calendar/1 and /student/calendar/1 which would route to different parts of your calendar controller.
It's all about modularising your application, so that you can easily maintain code that is logically grouped together. You don't have to separate them so much so that they are two different applications.
I think you will avoid many headaches in the long run.
If it makes you feel better about my opinion the software I work on that I was talking about is an enterprise solution that deals with (literally) millions of documents per day, and hundreds of thousands of users per week on the government level.
I am going to be creating a work order system with three roles
The "client" - The client can request projects to be completed by the worker. The project must be selected from a list of templates and various sub options all referred to as a campaign (campaign types come and go throughout the year)
The worker - The worker must be able to view work orders and mark them as accepted/rejected, work in progress and completed.
The overlord - He/She needs to see stats concerning the activity of the other two types of users.
So.
This is a web app. But a very simple one in terms of logic. Could something like drupal handle this? Or would I have to write my own modules? The other out of the box aspects of drupal make it attractive (admin, user creation, news feeds, etc...)
I have looked at Views and Webforms. Views seems great for querying and displaying data from the work order database (great for a portion of all three roles), but I am not clear as to how I interface with my work order database when creating and modifying work orders.
Webforms doesn't see to be the answer, I am sure I just missing something right under my nose.
Any hints in which direction to look would be great!
Thanks.
If you use a simpler, less powerful CMS, you may save time with the learning curve but lose time struggling with a less flexible framework. Also: Check how active the developer community is when evaluating Open Source software. You'll need support.
Views and Webforms may be tools that you'll end up using but what you're really talking about is work flow. You could build your own work flow with a combination CCK and views, yes. There are also work flow modules.
Are you and IRC user? See: http://drupal.org/irc
I am pretty certain that you can do this with drupal. I would suggest looking into using an easier CMS than drupal for something simple like this. Using something like MediaWiki for this application might be quicker to develop and have less of a learning curve. If you don't mind putting in the time to learn drupal, I think you will ultimately have more freedom.
First of all, don't underestimate Drupal's learning curve. Especially if your PHP and/or programming skills are relatively new. Drupal does a lot of things in it's own way, and it's good to know that way.
Secondly, Drupal is (imho) made first of all for outward facing sites, it can have a lot of stuff just for the users and not for the public, but a lot of its functionality is made for the CMS part of the system. You might consider using a more framework-style system like Zend Framework, which components are a bit more "loose" but also offers less functionality out of the box.
Thirdly, depending on what a work order is and how it should be treated a custom module could be needed. If a workorder has a really simple datamodel, it could probably be done without programming, but if it is complex you'll have to fire up your favorite editor. Don't worry, making a module sounds scarier than it really is.
I don't know how good your knowledge of drupal is, but to me this has CCK and Views2 and user roles written all over it.
Basically, use CCK to create your content types (remember the user reference field might come in handy to assign a node/record to a particular user)
Then create views for each user group (they could be shared, as you can assign them to more than one role type)
Creating a view where you filter the cck user reference field by the user looking at the screen may also come in handy here.
OKAY, there might be a little bit more to it than that, but what you want is doable.
UPDATE: To protect your site from unwanted eyes, check out the site security module as it puts a security wrapper around all of your website.
Views - Create lists - allow access by user roles
CCK - Define your own content types (add your own fields)
The form that currently loads during when our beta WinForm application starts up is one that shows a vast array of buttons... "Inventory", "Customers", "Reports", etc. Nothing too exciting.
I usually begin UI by looking at similar software products to see how they get done, but as this is a corporate application, I really can't go downloading other corporate applications.
I'd love to give this form a bit of polish but I'm not really sure where to start. Any suggestions?
EDIT: I am trying to come up with multiple options to present to users, however, I'm drawing blanks as well. I can find a ton of design ideas for the web, but there really doesn't seem to be much for Windows form design.
I have found that given no option, users will have a hard time to say what they want. Once given an option, it's usually easier for them to find things to change. I would suggest making some paper sketches of potential user interfaces for you application. Then sit down with a few users and discuss around them. I would imagine that you would get more concrete ideas from the users that way.
Update
Just a couple of thoughts that may (or may not) help you get forward:
Don't get too hung up on the application being "corporate". Many coprorate applications that I have seen look so boring that I feel sorry for the users that need to see them for a good share of their day.
Look at your own favourite UI's and ask yourself why you like them.
While not getting stuck in the "corporate template", also do not get too creative; the users collected experience comes from other applications and it may be good if they can guess how things work without training.
Don't forget to take in inspiration from web sites that you find appealing and easy to use.
Try to find a logical "flow"; visualize things having the same conceptual functionality in a consistent way; this also helps the user do successful "guesswork".
You might look to other applications that your users are familiar with. Outlook is ubiquitous in my company, and we were able to map our application to its interface relatively easily, so we used that application as a model when developing our UI.
Note that I'm not suggesting Outlook specifically to you, just that you look for UIs that would make your users' learning curve shallower.
The problem here is that you need some good user analysis and I'm guessing you've only done functional analysis.
Because your problem is so abstract, it's hard to give one good example of what you need to do. I'd go to usability.gov and check out the usability methods link, especially card sorting and contextual interviews.
Basically you want to do two things:
1- Discover where your users think how information is grouped on the page: This will help flesh out your functional requirements too. Once you've got information all grouped up, you've basically got your navigation metaphor set up. Also, you can continually do card sorting exercises right down to page and function levels - e.g. you do one card sorting session to understand user needs, then you take one group of cards and ask users to break that down into ranks of importance. Doing so will help you understand what needs to be in dominate areas of the screen and what can be hidden.
2- Understand what tools they already use: what they do and don't like about them. You need to get a list of tools/applications that they use externally and internally. Internally is probably the most important because there is a fair chance that most people in your business will share an experience of using it. External tools however might help give you context into how your users think.
Also, don't be afraid to get pencil and paper and sketch up ideas with users. People generally understand that sketches are a quick and useful way to help with early design work and you can get an immense amount of information out of them with just simple sketches. Yes, even do this if you suck at sketching - chances are it won't matter. In fact, crappy sketches could even work in your favour because then nobody is going to argue if buttons should be blue, red or whatever.
Frankly, a form with a “vast array of buttons” needs more than a little polish. A form dedicated solely to navigation generally means you’re giving your users unnecessary work. Provide a pulldown or sidebar menu on each form for navigating to any form.
The work area of your starting form should provide users with something to actually accomplish their tasks. Among the options are:
A “dashboard” main form, showing summarized information about the users’ work (e.g., list of accounts to review and status of each, number of orders at each stage of processing, To Do schedule). Ideally, users should be able to perform their most common tasks directly in the opening form (e.g., mark each account as “approved” or not). If further information is necessary to complete a task, links navigate to detailed forms filled with the proper query results. At the very least users should be able to assess the status of their work without going any further. Note that different groups of users may need different things on their respective dashboards.
Default form or forms. Users of a corporate application typically have specific assignments, often involving only one to three of all your forms. Users who work with Inventory, for example, may almost never need to look at Customer records, and vice versa. Users also often work on a specific subset of records. Each sales rep, for example may be assigned a small portion of the total number of customers in the database. Divide your users into groups based on the forms and records they usually use. For each user group, start the app by automatically opening the user group’s form(s) populated with the query results of their records. Users should be able to complete most of their work without any further navigation or querying.
If all else fails, open the app to whatever forms and content were last open when the user quit the app. Many corporate users will continue to work tomorrow on the same or similar stuff they’re working on today.
Analyze the tasks of your users to determine which of the above options to use. It is generally not productive to describe each option to the users and ask which they like better.
BTW, “Reports” is probably not a particularly good navigation option. It’s better if you consistently identify things primarily by what they show, rather than how they show it. Users may not know that the information they want to see is in a “report” rather than a form, but they’ll know what content they want to see. Reports on inventory are accessed under Inventory; reports about sales are accessed under Sales.
Have you tried asking your end users what they would like? After all they are the ones that are going to be using the system.
I use components from the company DevExpress. They have some really cool controls (such as the Office 2007 ribbon), form skinning utilities (with a vast amount of different skins), and a load more...
If you want to check it out they have 60 free components - if its corporate though you might have to check the licence but you can get it at... DevExpress 60 Free
I suggest starting with the design principles suggested by Microsoft: Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines
Some places to get ideas for interaction designs:
Books
About Face 3 - The Essentials of Interaction Design
Don't Make Me Think (this is focused on web design, but many of the principles carry over to Windows design)
Web Sites
Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines
In addition, many applications have free trial versions that you can download to determine how they handle user interaction. Also, don't discount items on your desktop right now.
Do you have any statistics or insights concerning what the most commonly-used or important functions might be? If so, you could use that to pare down your "vast array of buttons" and highlight only those that are most important.
That's sort of a trivial example, but the underlying point is that your understanding of your audience should inform your design, at least from a functional perspective. You might have past usage statistics, or user stories, or documented workflows, or whatever - even if you're drawing a blank right now, remember that you have to know something about your users, otherwise you wouldn't be able to write software for them.
Building on what they already know can make it easy on your users. Do they live in Outlook? Then you might want to mimic that (as Michael Petrotta suggested). Do they typically do the same thing (within a given role) every time they use the app? Then look for a simple, streamlined interface. Are they power users? Then they'll likely want to be able to tweak and customize the interface. Maybe you even have different menu forms for different user roles.
At this stage, I wouldn't worry about getting it right; just relax and put something out there. It almost doesn't matter what you design, because if you have engaged users and you give them the option, they're going to want to change something (everything?) anyway. ;-)