Thread

So I’ve been struggling with what I thought was a simple site but now has proven to be not so simple and I could use some advice from the good people of the EE community on how to proceed.

I have a site that consists of checklists of tasks that need to be completed by new employees. They need to be able to select/deselect each task as they complete them which can take anywhere from a week to a month. I already have the user registration framework set up using Zoo Visitor but I can’t figure out how to create the checklists. At first I thought each task list should be a channel with the individual tasks being channel fields in the group assigned to the channel. Then I could surface the checkboxes using Safecracker and save each users progress as an entry in that channel.

However, the questions need to be styled with paragraph breaks and links etc. and I can’t do this if each question is a channel field since those fields don’t support HTML formatting.

I also haven’t solved the problem of how to associate the task list entry with the proper user.

Maybe this is easier than I think and I’m just being a numbskull but I can’t seem to come up with a good strategy. To see what the final list should look like take a look at the development server which has a rough version of the front end:

Task Lists

If anyone has any ideas I would greatly appreciate it.

Hi apfeiffer,

I think this would be easier done with FreeForm. I hope that helps.

Mike

Hey apfeiffer,

What if, rather than storing task lists (or tasks as fields), which wouldn’t be very flexible, there was just a channel called “Tasks,” where one entry is one task, and has a list of custom categories assigned to it (so you can group the tasks in some way)?

The name of the task would just be in the entry title, and optionally, you could create a simple set of custom fields:

— a textarea field to add notes to the task
— a drop down list for stages of progress through the task
— a checkbox to indicate the task is done / not done

Each task could then be assigned to a registered member. If members are set up so that they appear in the author menu, a site administrator could just click on the tasks and assign them to users.

Now, if you wanted to make this self-administering…. I haven’t worked with Zoo Admin before, but I know that it’s a system where members are also stored as entries in a channel, right? And people can log in and check their own “entry” — I think?

If so, then one possibility would be that in the Members channel’s custom fields, you include a Playa field called “Tasks I Am Assigned To,” which displays all the entries from the Tasks channel.

Then a member could pull tasks they want to work on from the left pane of the “Tasks I am Assigned To” Playa field to the right to assign themselves to a task. (Basically, each Member entry sets up Related Entries from the Tasks channel, through the Playa field.)

However, for this to be really useful, I am thinking that people would want to see not just their own membership entry, but browse the tasks and see if they’ve been “taken” already. If this is what you want to do, one possibility is developing a series of Safecracker forms (in which you can display Playa fields). People could then update their entry on the front end of the site (like a user account).

On the front end, you could then also let people browse the tasks (as a list of channel entries, perhaps grouped by category), and click on tasks to see details. Then you could use Reverse Related Records to display which member “entries” are associated with the task via the Playa field.

I’ll stop here, though, just in case this isn’t what you have in mind at all and I’m way out in the outfield now. 

@MadWebDesigns,

I thought so as well and I spent some time looking over the documentation on their site. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to allow the kind of formatting I need for my tasks. Each task contains text formatting and/or links which Freeform doesn’t support in it’s form fields (as far as I can tell).

@Oxygen Smith,

I was thinking about using Playa for this as well but couldn’t figure out how it might apply. The tasks are set and cannot be edited by the users. Each user group sees different tasks, although some of them are duplicated among all 3 groups. All the user can do is check off whether they’ve completed each task. If the box is unchecked, the task has not been completed. Seems pretty simple but I can’t work out how to track all the users status for each task while still allowing the tasks themselves to be easily editable by one of the Super Admins.