Hi folks!
I've started using Storm fairly recently and am fairly blown away by it. It and CiviCRM greatly increase the types of usage cases I can develop for, so I figure I want to do my best to make Storm the de facto groupware module for Drupal.
While the module's pretty solid, I'd be completely lost had I not a lot of prior experience in developing PHP code. It's good that there's some documentation, but it really doesn't go into the richness that is Storm.
To this end, I'd really like to spearhead a documentation project explaining basic usage cases to non-programmer end users, and how to configure the module for certain situations.
If you're open to the idea of me going ahead with this, please help out by providing topic suggestions worth covering. Note that I haven't contacted the other documentation people and just recently put myself down as somebody wanting to contribute to that aspect -- apologies if this is in bad form, again, somewhat of a Drupal neophyte.
Cheers,
—Æ.
Comments
Great stuff. There are no
Great stuff. There are no specific topic suggestions - as you have found out the documentation is fairly lacking.
A good place to start might be to write a how-to guide about your use case - which modules you're using and how you configured them. I'm guessing its easiest to start with something that you've had personal experience with.
Another bit that really needs some help text are the pages within Storm - are there any of the pages / forms that Storm provides that it took you a while to get? They would be a good target.
Thanks!
Hi!Thanks, that's a good
Hi!
Thanks, that's a good starting point. I was thinking about fleshing out http://drupal.org/node/437426 initially -- making each aspect of Storm link to a separate page detailing operation -- but operation is pretty similar amongst the different Storm modules, so writing up usage case-driven tutorials seems like a much more effective use of time.
Mine's a bit of a specialized usage case -- essentially, I'm linking custom content types to projects via nodereference, returning a field value from which the price is dynamically calculated in invoice. It'd really only be relevant to surveyors and real estate people. I'd be happy to explain the process by which I did this as an advanced usage case demonstrating how to create modules hooking into Storm and the Form API, but it might be a tad much for new users.
To that end, I think more generalized tutorials are better starting out. Here are some ideas:
a. Using Storm as an internal project management system
b. Using Storm as an externally-facing issue tracking system
c. Using Storm with Calendar.module for appointment booking
d. Customizing Storm -- Attributes, form elements
e. Using UberCart for online billing via Storm (tentative)
I think that's good for the moment. Please feel free to post other ideas!
--
ændrew rininsland
news, photos, data, code.
aendrew.com :: @aendrew
I'm a surveyor
I'd love to see how you are using Storm for surveying. I use it as a fairly simple project task management tool for my engineering dept. We use vision for billing, so I don't utilize any of the time/invoice modules.
The biggest thing I did was
The biggest thing I did was create a new custom content type, populated it with fields (essentially a measurement sheet), added a nodereference field to the Storm Project content type, and then use the referred "total area" field to calculate project cost (since my client bills not per hour, but rather, per square foot.).
It's not super particular to surveying, but I can't think of another usage case off the top of my head where you'd need to pass a value to Storm Project/Invoice via a nodereference field (maybe this could be a way to tie Ubercart's functionality to Storm, perhaps allowing Storm to do online invoice payment? Not entirely sure; haven't tried this.). If anyone can think of a more generalized usage case where this ability would be valuable, let me know and I'll try it as an advanced tutorial.
--
ændrew rininsland
news, photos, data, code.
aendrew.com :: @aendrew
Hi aendrew, thanks for your
Hi aendrew,
thanks for your initative. I would be very cool if you could improve the ocumentation of storm. It is on our task list, but we do not have the time. I think use case driven documentation would be a great help for all.