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ADDING TEAMS
Creating a Team
As a quick reminder, the term Team in Review Foundry is basically just what might be referred to elsewhere as a Group--it is simply a collection of members who share some common attributes.
Luke's first task, if he wishes to set up reviewable member pages, is to add teams to his Review Foundry database. Teams are discussed in depth in the Review Foundry Manual, where the emphasis is on adding/editing teams via the Database control panel. In this tutorial we will approach the same problem by using the Team Browser. The Browser is designed to allow the Administrator (or assigned team editors) to perform team operations by interacting with the team tree, which remains visible on the left of the page in a separate frame.
To get to the Team Browser Luke enters the administrative area of Review Foundry by typing a URL into his web browser something like:
http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/path/to/.../foundry/do/admin/admin.cgi
He then looks for the Team Browser, which can be accessed from a link on the left side of the navigation bar entitled Teams. When he clicks on it he sees a new page with a bare folder named Home on the left. This represents the top level of the (currently empty) team tree. It should look something like this:
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Home |
Luke clicks on the Home folder and a single link appears on the right of the page entitled "Add Team". He clicks again and sees a form for adding a team. To create a top-level team named "Digital Art" he fills in the form like so:
An asterisk indicates a required field. At a minimum, the team requires a "Name". When a team is created the supplied "Name" field cannot contain the forward slash / as this is the character used to delimit components of a team. If Luke sets the "Is Validated" field, the created team will appear on public pages. Otherwise it is only accessible to him. If a team "Description" is provided it can be placed on the public pages. It can also be hidden by toggling the appropriate configuration variable from the administrative configuration pages. If a team "Description", or team "Keywords", are provided, these will be used to fill the metadata fields for the team when static pages are built. This helps spiders index your pages more accurately. These two fields also assist in the functioning of the internal Review Foundry search engine.
As Luke does, you should ignore the "Template Prefix" field (consider it an advanced feature which can be used to bypass the default team templates). For now, Luke also ignores the section of the form containing the "Rating Questions" which control which rating attributes are assigned to the team. To simplify things, this section of the form has been ignored in the current discussion. We will come back to the rating questions later, once the team is created. If desired, an "Image" can also be assigned to the team by clicking on the Manage Upload button and using the dialog box that appears to upload an image. In general, if you want to add an image to each team, it would probably be wise to delay this until you have come up with a series of images, all of the same size and style, which can be used to decorate the teams in a uniform way. For the purposes of our discussion Luke decides not to bother with team images.
When Luke submits the Add Team form the team is created and the Team Browser automatically updates to display the new configuration:
  Home |
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Digital Art (0) |
The zero in the parentheses on the right of the new Digital Art team indicates that there are no members in the team yet. We postpone for the moment the question of how members are assigned to teams (basically they elect to join them), and instead allow Luke to click on the "Add Team" link on the right of the page to create another team beneath Digital Art, to be named Human Illustration. He goes through the same procedure as before, fills in the form, supplying Human Illustration for the "Name" field, and submitting. The new Digital Art > Human Illustration team is created, and the Team Browser updates to reflect the team addition:
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Home |
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Digital Art (0) |
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Human Illustration (0) |
It is always a good idea to plan out the intended team tree before one begins adding them to the database. However, teams can be moved or deleted if needed, and Luke would find the links to perform these operations on the right side of the page once a given team is added. At this point we stop and move onto the next task, which is to define the various rating attributes to associate with each team.
Next Section: ADDING RATING ATTRIBUTES
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