EXT: PAE Project Management¶

What does it do?¶

• This extension permits to include a project management application on your website where multiple project administrators and workers can collaborate on updating project informations.

• The extension is capable of compiling the information from several sub-projects for displaying a synthetic view in the parent project display : it will compute the global cost, the global worked days count, the project start and end dates, and the global progress of the project. Thus, each parent task displays a synthesis of its child tasks up to the root project.

• The extension allows the definition of exceptions and worked days : exceptions are exceptional periods which are not worked, such as holidays. You can define an exception and attach it to some project. Thus some projects which have manpower can still be worked while some others affected by exceptions are suspended for a fixed period of time. Worked days allow specifying days of the week which have workers present. If only 3 days are worked per week and a project requires 9 days of working, the extension will automatically spread the duration of the project on 3 weeks.

• Last but not least, the extension displays the tasks as bars on a Gantt style graph. The Gantt graph applet is programmed in Flash (using Actionscript 3.0) and the full source code and Flash project files can be found in the /res/ directory of the extension and can be used under the terms of the GNU/GPL Licence.

  The development of this extension has been funded and sponsored by the Communauté d'Agglomération du Pays d'Aubagne et de l'Etoile ( http://www.agglo-paysdaubagne.com/ ), a public group of cities located in the south of France.

  Beside the fact they needed such an extension, they have been using successfully Typo3 for 3 years on their web site and they were desirous to provide the Typo3 community something useful and valuable in return.

  The programming has been done by Mind2Machine ( http://www.mind2machine.com ). All the code of this extension, included the Actionscript code of the Flash applet is available under GPL Licence. Please send us any improvements you may achieve.

Screenshots¶

This is the projects list

Display of a child project (leaf project in the project tree)

Same project in edit mode

Exception editing

The Gantt graph detailed

Extension installation¶

In the extension manager look for extension key “pae_project” and install it the regular way. Once installed, you may alter the default extension options :

For most users, basic settings should apply and you can skip to the next section “Extension usage”.

More detail on these settings follow :

The “TypeNum” setting gives the page type value for accessing the XML description of projects managed by the extension. This XML data is read by the Flash applet for displaying the project summary. But you could also use the XML project descriptions in order to have them displayed by a third party application, such as a program located on a distant server. Notice however that in the current version of the extension, only the relevant display information is published, not the full project properties.

The XML data can be viewed using an URL of the following format :

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?id=page_uid_where_the_plugin_i s_inserted&type=TypeNum

A real world example would be :

http://www.mysite.com/index.php?id=245&type=9003

You may want to alter the TypeNum value if some extension already installed in your Typo3 setup already uses the default page type.

The “date format” setting specifies how dates show be displayed. The default setting is the French setting. You may want to specify another format related to your locale as specified in the php date() function documentation :

http://fr.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

Extension usage¶

Using PAE Project management requires users to be identified so the extension can perform rights check upon the current user profile. If the user is not identified, the extension will display projects in read only mode.

Let's go for a basic setup in read only mode first. We will add user authentication after.

Create a regular Typo3 page (we will name it “PAE project test page”) and a sysfolder named “projects”. It may be a good idea to put the sysfolder right below the page in order to group your project stuff, but you may also put the sysfolder anywhere you like.

The “Projects” folder will be used to store our project records.

Edit “PAE project test page” page in Page mode and insert the plugin “PAE project manager” in it :

Then you can edit the plugin properties :

For now, just add the “Projects” sysfolder as a startingpoint . Save the form .

Switch to list mode and get into your projects sysfolder .

Create a new record of type “Project element”.

Notice just below the “Project element” record type there is another record type belonging to this extension : “Worked days exception”. This record type will allow specifying days that are exceptionally not worked on certain projects.

You may now type a project title such as “My first project” here and you add a description.

By default, projects are created with the current day specified as start and end dates with a project duration of 1 day.

You may also attach some documents to the project so they can be downloaded by people looking at the project record in frontend.

Now you can preview your Typo3 page holding the project plugin :

As you can see, your first project appears in the Gantt graph. It is very small because it lasts only one day.

You can also see a warning because we have not defined a global administrator. We will do this in the next section.

Right under the warning goes the list of current projects. You can see “My first project listed” with its description (cropped to the first 300 characters).

Hit the “view” button to access the project file :

¶

There you can see your first project file. Estimated information appears in grey, real information in orange.

Now we can add roles to our projects, but it requires user authentication to be enabled.

Adding user authentication¶

In order to manage user roles, they have to be identified. The PAE project management relies on Typo3 generic user system so you can use you favorite login box and put it anywhere you like in your page template. Our preference goes for Macmade's loginbox (ext key : loginbox_macmade ) because it allows specifying the sysfolder used for storing your user profiles and features high customization possibilities. Therefore we will use the macmade loginbox in this example, but any other loginbox should work.

Create a sysfolder where to store your frontend users if you don't have any yet. You may also use the GRSP (General Record Storage Path)

Install extension loginbox_macmade

Insert the loginbox before the PAE project management extension in your page :

Adjust the loginbox settings. Set the startingpoint parameter with the folder where your user profiles are due to be stored. Save and close the loginbox extension properties.

Switch to List mode . Get into your users sysfolder and create a record of type “website usergroup”. Let's name it “PAE project user profiles”. This step is required because you can't create a frontend user if it doesn't belong to any group.

Now create a record of type “website user” in the same folder, and set “superadmin” as a username. This will be our global administrator profile. You may add some additional information, but username and password are the only required informations.

Also create 2 other frontend user profiles for testing with the following usernames : “admin” and “worker”. Read next section to know more about the usage of those profiles.

Preview your PAE Project test page in the browser. The authentication form should now properly show up.

User roles in PAE project management¶

In PAE project management, there are 3 types of user roles : Global administrator, project administrator, project worker.

The Global Administrator(s) is specified in the plugin settings. He has access to any editing feature of any project and exceptions in the frontend view.

The project Administrator has the capacity to modify any fields of a project where he is defined as an administrator and the same goes also for all of its children projects (user rights are inherited automatically between parent and child projects).

The worker has the capacity to modify the fields of a project related to real world data (estimated data can only be set by the administrator) where he is defined as a worker. The same goes also for all of its children projects. Thus a worker can not specify a project, but as he is working on the project he can update its progress data so other frontend users and administrators can be informed of the progress of his work.

Setting parent to child project relationships¶

In order to set a project as a child of another project, you must, when you create or edit your child project, set the “parent” field with the parent project of your choice. As all editing operations, this can be done with frontend project editing form of with the backend form :

Frontend parent field

Backend parent field

Parent to child relationships are reflected in the project display

Important notice : an important thing to understandwhen working with parent / child relationships is that when a child is assigned to a project, this parent project then acts as a container : its own cost, duration, start and end dates become ignored because they get replaced at display by the synthetic information aggregated from its child projects. This is because a parent project can also be defined as the sum of the sub-projects / sub-tasks that compose it. Thus, in a project tree, the time and cost settings that count are the values located in “leaf” projects, a “leaf” project being located at the very end of a branch.

The aggregated data can be consulted when looking at a parent project file in “view” mode. It can only be seen in frontend.

FAQ¶

Why is it mandatory to have real start date specified, even though working for real on my project hasn't started ?

This has been forced in order to fix a problem : When no start date is specified, Typo3 sets the date value at 0 which is the basic value of Unix time. This value translate to date 01/01/1970 which causes problems for displaying the Gantt graph as the way from 1970 to 2008 is a looooooong way. We may code a more stylish solution to this problem in the future, but for now this is the quick and dirty solution.

Send your questions to extensions@mind2machine.com

Plugin flexform settings¶

Global administrators : List of users with full frontend management capability over this extension

Gantt graph display order : Specifies if the Gantt graph should be shown before or after the project text content

Show Gantt graph policy : Allows to set the Gantt graph display to occur only in project listing mode or to completely get rid of it.

List mode display :Allows choosing between displaying all projects or root projects only in the projects list. In root projects only mode, children projects can still be accessed either by their parent project file display or by clicking their title in the Gantt graph which continues to display all projects.

Typoscript settings¶

plugin.tx_paeproject_pi1 {
    projectDisplayFields = title, description, documents, worked_days, estimated_data, estimated_start_date, estimated_end_date, estimated_duration, estimated_days_project_duration, estimated_cost_per_day, estimated_cost, real_data, real_start_date, real_end_date, real_duration, cost_per_day, real_cost, real_cost_per_day, computed_estimated_data, computed_real_data, real_days_project_duration, progress, parent, children, dependencies, exceptions, administrators, workers
    defaultValues{
            title =  New project
            description =  type description here
            worked_days =  1,2,3,4,5
            estimated_start_date = now
            estimated_duration =  1
            estimated_cost = 0
            estimated_cost_per_day = 0
            real_start_date =  now
            real_duration =  0
            cost_per_day = 0
            progress = 0
            parent =
            dependencies =
            administrators =
            workers =
    }
    adminButtonsOverride{
            listAllProjects =
            createProject =
            listAllExceptions =
            createException =
    }
    editButtonsOverride{
            view =
            edit =
            delete =
    }
    useExceptions = 1
    cssStylesheet =
}