MODX as Collaboration Platform?

Hi all,

For a while now I’ve been wanting to revamp the website of our collective company Except.nl to one which supports the actual work process rather than just be an information portal for the outside world. I took a stroll through CMS land and found that MODX would be the natural system to use to suit the style and specificity of such a task.

However, since then I have had many thoughts on how CMS and project management could really come together. We work on projects with a large amount of people distributed over the world, scientists, engineers, artists, designers, you name it, and all the project management lies solely with me at the moment. This means anything from creating the folder structure for people to store files in of each project, all the google docs that people work in, the hour administration, meetings, presentations, all that jazz.

So, the other day I went on another trip to find something that really supports our collaboration, makes my job easier and improves our work to make the world a tad better. I found Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 which looks interesting, but the word Microsoft is enough to scare me away from even the cutest bunny. So, I thought I would come on here and talk with some of you to see if we can build a true collaborative platform using MODX, have it be available to the world for free or for little, and build MODX in the process.

I’d like to invite you to think along and help figure this out, and perhaps tell me how we can build it. I can’t build it myself, but a close friend of mine is willing to help and I have a little bit of money I could put into it.

To me, a truly collaborative platform has the following functions:

A front end that is a website showing projects, info and other standard website stuff. Big difference is that the projects shown are just ’PR’ subsets of the collaborative system’s project sections. The admin makes a new project, which is then collaborated on in the private areas of the site, clients can log in and see a small client-subset for downloading and uploading files and seeing some progress, and so on. Once the project is done, the PR section of it is filled out using images that are likely to be already in the project, or at least on the server where the CMS stores all its project data (which should be able to be a different, local server!), and then published to show up on the public website. Logging in as a collaborator and browsing to the relevant project then gives you automatically the option to download large res images of the project, and drill down into the project collaboration section.

So the website as a whole has something like the following:

- General front page
- Projects page
- About pages (with members listing)
- Login / registration pages
- News / Blog

Basic project functionality like:
- Shared calendar, hooking into google calendar & iCal
- File management up and download from a predescribed server (with version management? Maybe not)
- Message area where blog-like messages could be updated about each project + comments
(Messages can be flagged to be shown to clients as well as collaborators, or as company news)
- Project member info and contact info
- Group email account per project for easy group emailing, then goes automatically into blog as thread
- All the PR info section for the project, and publication options
- Easy quicklinks to specific downloads (project report for client, other important files)

I’m sure things can be added/changed to make this more comprehensive. I would like to see this as version 1.0. Then, in time, we might be able to progress towards a truly integrated visual environment where all this functionality and more is embedded in a single four dimensional interface (spatial plus time). We’ve worked on designing the concept of such a system earlier this year (the Dandelion Project), and we think it’s technically possible but will take several years to develop.

How can we start making version 1.0? Who would like to help, and what budget would I need to set myself to enable this to happen?

I’d love to hear your ideas. And thanks for MODX!

Tom

This is obviously a very big undertaking, but I don’t see anything offhand that couldn’t be done in MODx. I think MODx Revolution has many of the tools you’d need (with the exception of the calendar function -- which should be along soon) and is more suitable for a large site with many users. There would be a fair amount of custom code required, but that would be true for any CMS.

It looks like an interesting project. I wish I had the time to get involved.

I know this is a MODx forum, and to be honest I have not yet fully digested your post, but it sounds like you’re after something like Basecamp - http://basecamphq.com/. It’s a paid service, which might not be to everyone’s taste, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. I briefly used it on a project I was involved with a while back, and thought it was pretty well thought out and had a nice interface. I’m sure there are other solutions (you mention Microsoft as one), but Basecamp is the only one I’m vaguely familiar with.

Dan

Basecamphq looks nice, but it has some downsides which disqualify it at once. First off, information is stored on their servers, not locally. This is a no-go, because our files can be huge and working with them remotely is not an option. We do still have an office with a group of people that need to benefit from LAN network speeds.

Second, Basecamphq locks us into their proprietary format. If we ever want to switch we’d need to extract all info manually. That’s not an option. All project data needs to be primarily organized on disk in a logical and navigable structure. Text files are text files, project phases in folders, and so on. You need to be directly hooked into the data stream from disk, managed by the CMS but not actually part of the CMS. Does that make sense?

Just to add to this, for our particular purpose, the actual public website is the first and primary goal. The project management structure can start out very small, with just a client login for files for instance, and grow as time goes by. We need a CMS structure for our website fast, the amount of maintenance and work I have to put in for each new page now is too much. It’s pure HTML.

In the start phases we can hook into as much existing tools as possible: no need to replace google docs if it already exists, until there’s a particular benefit (such as saving to disk, for instance), the calendar can be directly used from google calendar, and many other tools already exist. For a unified project setup (make new calendar, ne google docs etc at once) that would have to be localized, but it doesn’t have to do that immediately from the start.

So, start with a normal content website, add user logins and project pages, and build it out from there. Of course, if you have a better idea, that’s very welcome too!

The idea is nice (but maybe it’s a huge work to do).

The best idea is maybe to find a project manager (preferably open source) which fits your needs & try to build a « bridge ».
I’ve tested Active Collab (no more open source, but there is a fork called project pier) and found it really nice. Maybe you should look that way.

My 2 cents.

Cheers

Hi,

This might be useful, here is a list of some collaboration software:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collaborative_software

At the company I work for we are starting a similar project based on Zimbra ( http://www.zimbra.com ).

Information about their webbased system: http://www.zimbra.com/products/collaboration.html

Our focus is on the docs part which is something we are currently testing. We basically want to copy Google Docs but have all the data on our own servers.
The other services you’ve mentioned is something we already have throughout different application, though Zimbra can do calandering (caldav) + contacts + email.

In our environment (pure Mac environment) we currently use these applications and as I’ve mentioned Zimbra might in the future take over some of these features, but that would need some testing before we migrate

• Apple Wiki service: Wiki + blog service which comes with OSX Server. Has wiki + blog + calendar + webmail and allows users to change their passwords + setup out of office replies / server side mail rules.
• Roundcube: Because Apples comes with SquirrelMail I decided to replace that one with Roundcube, so much more refreshing then SquirrelMail
• ClockWise: For registering work ours (not sure what the correct English word is for that), allows our management to nicely setup projects and get reports from all employees.
• Zimbra: For now just for document collaboration but probably in the future as a replacement for the Apple wiki + Roundcube.

Since Zimbra comes as an Open Source Edition it’s pretty low cost ^_~ ( http://www.zimbra.com/downloads/os-downloads.html ) Allows you to test, evaluate, deploy, customize, and improve. Where deploy sounds to me that you can simply use it in an production environment.

And if you were to buy the support then the costs are pretty low imho.

My 2 cents.

*edit*

Wiki page with some more info on Zimbra:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbra

I have the similar task, but based on ArchiOffice.

If you think you have an idea to make this tool can be shared among the different job fields, count me in.

Quote from: goldsky at Jul 26, 2010, 08:52 AM

I have the similar task, but based on ArchiOffice.

If you think you have an idea to make this tool can be shared among the different job fields, count me in.

I guess that would depend on your requirements, each job can have different needs.

In our case we want to have multiple people working on the same documents, where documents are Word, Excel (spreadsheet) and Powerpoint documents. Eventually we will probably use the e-mail and calendar features as well when we’ve fully tested them allowing us to migrate from Apple’s software towards Zimbra.

If those are similar to your requirements then it’s probably fairly easy to make such a system available to multiple job fields.

Quote from: 1ynx at Jul 26, 2010, 09:19 AM

If those are similar to your requirements then it’s probably fairly easy to make such a system available to multiple job fields.

That sounds quite interesting. Do you see there being a particular concern if the systems used are cross-platform between windows, linux and mac? Because that’s our situation. Does it tie into a web CMS?

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply.

Our Zimbra project is only just starting so I don’t yet know all the fine details but I would have to say that Zimbra lacks a proper CMS system. It’s really just focussed on being a collaboration platform instead of being a CMS / Website.

Proper overview of their features + de different versions:

• http://www.zimbra.com/products/product_editions.html

This should give you a nice overview of what you can expect of the Open Source version.

I can safely say that it’s entirely multi platform, our focus is the same as yours in that matter. We only have Apple and Linux clients, so the web applications we use / setup have to work on Firefix, Safari, Opera and Chrome (or Chronium / Iron). In addition we will probably tie Zimbra to our LDAP in order to use our office accounts for this system as well. Our LDAP is currently already being used for logging into Mac clients, e-mail, calendar, contacts, hour registration and our Apple wiki portal.

In addition Zimbra seems to come with desktop clients for Windows, Linux and Mac but I havent had a look into that particular feature (our focus is mostly on browser compatibility).

I would say that with proper theming any web application can tie into a CMS, the same goes for Zimbra really. The only thing I don’t know is if it will tie into the user database for a CMS like e.g. MODx, I would guess that it’s definitely possible and since the Open Source version can be modified it’s also possible to build that part yourself if it’s not present.

Again for that part, we only just started the project and initial research was done but when it comes to the more fine details I would need more time to learn the system before being able to answer in more detail.