Review Foundry Review Engine User Manual TEAM RECORDS

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• TEAM RECORDS
• Creating a Team
• Editable Team Fields
• Editable Non-Team Fields
• Adding New Team Fields

TEAM RECORDS

Teams are very much like Categories, except they contain Members instead of Items. Another name for "Team" might be "Group". Once you have created a set of Teams, Members can join these and advertise themselves to the community as individuals. They can also be reviewed and rated, according to the rating attributes associated with the Team. How you define your Teams is entirely up to you. Teams are organized with the same kind of hierarchical structure that defines Categories. Every Team, except a topmost Team, will have a parent Team to which it belongs, and each Team may be assigned an Editor who can handle reviews submitted on the Members who belong to that Team.

Once you have entered a Team into the Team table, and it has been allocated a Team ID of, say, 8, then you can navigate to the Team detail page via the browsable Member pages, or you can enter the URL to the Team detail page directly into your browser, like so:

http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/path/to/...
	/foundry/do/reviews.cgi?module=find_member&team_id=8

Creating a Team

As with the other "Creating a Container" pages in this documentation, we cover here the procedure associated with adding a Team from the Database control panel, though you can also use the Team Browser in the admin area to create records. If you're not sure how to get to the Database control panel, see Creating a Category.

From the Database menu on the Database control panel, select "Add" for the action and "Team" for the table. Click on the submit button to have the right frame load. You'll then see the following form elements (example input values have been added for clarity, and are explained below):

Name
Subcategory of	-- --Root-- Football Baseball
Description	Looking for cogent Baseball commentary? Find out who's offering it in the Critics area.
Keywords	Baseball, Criticism, Analysis
Template Prefix
Image
Is Validated	Yes No
Invitation Only	No Yes

You can see that the input fields for this container are virtually identical to the ones for the corresponding Category form. This is not surprising as Category, Team, and YellowPage tables are all realizations of the Container concept discusssed in UNDERSTANDING THINGS & CONTAINERS. The only difference here is the appearance of the Invitation Only field (discussed below) which can be used to stop Members from enrolling themselves into your Teams.

Editable Team Fields

The following summary of the Team fields which appear both on the Add Team and Modify Team pages is mainly a rehash of the same information found in the corresponding section for Categories (but for purposes of self-containment, is presented here again). Note that the last 2 fields displayed above--Is Validated and Invitation Only--only appear when the Administrator or an Editor is logged in.

Name When you name a Team, you name it locally. That is, you provide the name of the Team relative to some parent Team. In the example, "Critics" is the parent Team, and "Baseball" is the name of the new Team. The full name of the newly-created Team will be "Critics/Baseball". Clearly, you cannot include a / in your Team name (as / is the Team delimiter), otherwise you will get an error message. The column is Team.name

Subcategory of
Each Team is either a topmost Team, or it has a parent Team. If you add a topmost Team, select "--Root--" for the value of the parent Team. Otherwise select the parent Team in which you wish to create your new Team. It is the ID of the parent Team which is actually stored, not the parent Team name itself. The corresponding column is Team.parent_id

Description
The Description for a Team is entirely optional. If defined, the description will appear beneath the Team breadcrumbs on pages which list either Teams, or the content of a Team. The description can also be toggled off from the Build / Browse frame of the Configure control panel. The column is Team.description

Keywords
The Keywords field is an optional string of comma-delimited words or phrases that will be used to populate metadata tags in the static version of the browsable Team pages. Their purpose is thus to help spiders correctly index your web pages. This is a VARCHAR(255) column, meaning that the length of the field is limited to 255 characters. The column is Team.keywords

Template Prefix
The Template Prefix is an experimental column, not particularly recommended for use. If, for example, you supply the value "blue" for the Template Prefix (instead of leaving it blank) the 2 Team-related templates named find_member.ttml and find_member_list.ttml will NOT be processed in the usual way, and Review Foundry will look for the templates named blue_member.ttml and blue_member_list.ttml instead. Thus you would need to create these two new templates before attempting to use them. So if you really want to use a different set of templates for a given Team, this is one way to do it. The column is Team.template_prefix

Image
The Image field is optional and is based on an INT (integer) column which acts as a foreign key to the Upload table. To add an image to the Team record (it should be a small image which establishes a setting without pushing everything else around it out of place) you click on the button marked "Manage Upload" and a dialog box appears requesting information about the file to be uploaded. Once you have uploaded the image, a MIME icon and the name of the image file will appear on the Team record form itself, verifying that the image file is available before you even submit the Team record to the database. If you have enabled automatic image thumbnailing, a thumbnail of the uploaded image will also be stored along with the unscaled image. The column is Team.team_image

Is Validated
The Is Validated field toggles between "Yes" and "No". A Team will only appear on public pages if it is validated. The column is Team.is_validated

Invitation Only
The Invitation Only field toggles between "Yes" and "No". If you select "Yes", Members will be able to enroll themselves into any Team of their choice (up to the imposed maximum limit). But if you want to restrict Team membership to a select few only, then toggle this field to "No". In this case you will have to place Members onto Teams yourself, which you can do by pulling up the Modify Member page in the Database control panel and editing their Team associations directly. The column is Team.is_invitation_only

Editable Non-Team Fields

In addition to the Team fields shown above, there may be other non-Team fields which appear on the Add Team and Modify Team pages. The Administrator is able to modify the collection of rating attributes (or types) associated with a Team (which we term a Rating Template), so an extra form element will be present to handle this. As the form element is identical to the one shown in the corresponding section for Categories we'll just refer you to it instead of re-presenting it here: Editable Non-Category Fields. Each of the Container types, Category, Team, and Yellow Page use the same table to determine the elements of their Rating Template, namely the RatingType table, so the treatment is uniform for all Container types.

Notes relating to Editor assignment would be the same as those presented in the section for Editable Non-Category Fields with the exception that Editor assignment is carried out by directly loading the Add page for the TeamEditor table.

Adding Team Fields

If you need to add extra fields to the Team table you can do this. For detailed information on the process of adding columns to existing tables, see ADDING COLUMNS TO A TABLE.

If you add columns which are used by some Teams and not others you can test for the column value before displaying it in any template which receives Team information. For example, if you add a Team.conditions column that you expect enrolling Members to observe you can test with something like this:

	[% team = alias.team_info %]

	[% IF team.conditions %]
		PLEASE OBSERVE: [% team.conditions %]
	[% END %]

Note: in practice you will have to search for the relevant team hash to reference. It might, for example, be current_level.team_info which is buried in a team loop somewhere within one of the Template-Toolkit templates used for the browsable Team pages.

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