[Phpgroupware-developers] ACL documentation

[Léonard Wauters]

Hello everybody,

I started interesting myself on phpgroupware for 4 months now, mostly because 
we want to use it in our company to help us working in a nomad way. We found 
the project very interresting and promising, with no comparison possible 
with "professional" tools like Lotus Notes (that also cost a lot, that means 
less coofee at break-time ;) ). We also believe that in few years, quite every 
company will be using this kind of tool to help organisate and to lead to a 
better management.
Later, we intend to distribute it to other companies, as a complement of our 
main activity : management council and quality in little companies.
We also intend to develop a new module wich deals with file management, like 
phpwebhosting, but with extra functionalities, like file sharing and per-file 
right management, in order to :
-make possible file sharing between users without copying files to a group 
folder,
-create folders with read-only rights for some users
-keep exsisting phpwebhosting functionnalities (upload, download, rename, and 
per-user private directory with the ability of creating folders, files etc...)
I already talked with Jason Wies (VFS Class developper) and Jonathon Sim in 
order to get some advices and to be sure how not to interfere with an existing 
project.
However, I am still not a specialist in programming in phpgw environment. In 
fact, the main lack for me is API documentation, mostly about ACL management.
I found a document on axisgroupware.org that deal with inheritance, but I'm 
seraching for some others docs. Unfortunately, docs.phpgroupware.org is closed, 
and I don't know other resources.
So, if someone have some papers about ACL, can he send me by mail or give me 
the url ? Any extra doc will also be well-accepted ;)

One more thing I would like to talk about. We have made some modifications on 
phpgroupware for our internal use because we found that some functionnalities 
(mostly ergonomic) were lacking. For example, we modified some inadapted font 
sizes that were hard-coded on the calendar module (function css()), put some 
return buttons where they were lacking (like in email module, when you read a 
message, there is no button in the bottom of the page to get back to the folder 
you were in just before). We also made some modifications on phpgw_fr.lang 
files (we are a french company), because some translations were inadapted. 
Sometimes, the same messaage identifier was used in two different modules (so 
they called the same french sentence) but it was more adapted to have two 
different translations. Finally, we modified some templates in order to make 
phpgroupware display well in a 800x600 window (ie. with no sliders), and it was 
quite dificult sometimes...
The most difficult part was to modifiy the addressbook module, where a lot of 
fields were inadapted to our activity (like Suffix, Middle name, not used in 
France, or Message phone, car phone, public key, etc...), mostly because all 
fields are hard-coded in the addressbook classes.
As we intend to distribute phpgroupware to people that are not used to 
manipulate this kind of software (and that do not have a very good feeling with 
computers ;)), our objective is to make it the most intuitive possible, with 
evident on-screen functions, arrows, buttons, etc... We were also thinking on 
putting some javascript pop-up helps to facilitate the use of the portal for 
those who are not accustomed with it.
I would like to know if there will be any major change in ergonomy (buttons 
instead of links, better display of some infrmations, etc...) in the next 
release, and what importance is given to the ergonomy in the project. In fact, 
if the portal is intuitive enough, anyone could use it without having to do a 
training period.
Congratulations to most of people who developped the modules, of course we 
liked it and found it fantastic. even if on our point of view, there is some 
little extra work to do, we found some modules great.
I apologise for my poor english ;)

Sincerely,

Leo.


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