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ADDING TEAMS / NETWORKS
Creating a Team
As a quick reminder, the term Team, or Network, in Red Queen is simply what might be referred to elsewhere as a Group--it is merely a collection of members who share some common attributes. The important thing to remember about teams is that once a member is placed in one (generally by signing up) they become reviewable members--their peers can rate and review them according to the attributes associated with the group.
The kinds of groups that a Red Queen webmaster might wish to set up will be strongly influenced by the theme of the site and the wishes and suggestions of its members. Afterall, they will be the ones who make or break the network. It is always a very good idea to poll members to discover exactly what kind of networks and network attributes they believe will best benefit them. In this instance, we suppose that Kyla has learned that many of her members are interested in finding out how potential dates have fared on their first dates with other members. Having found themselves tapping their watches 40 minutes after a date was supposed to show in the past, punctuality quickly emerged as an attribute of interest. Dishonesty, known to be a problem in online dating, prompted the request for an indication of how accurately a member's photographs of themselves reflect their true physical appearance. In response, Kyla has introduced the photorealism attribute. In addition to these two, personality and dateworthiness (are they worthy of a repeat date) also appear in every network she sets up. Other attributes may be more network specific. For instance, one network Kyla has set up is First Dates > Beach Partiers, to which she wants to add the attribute soakability (it's always a good idea to give your attributes names as descriptive and unique as you can make them).
Teams are discussed in depth in the Red Queen Manual, where the emphasis is on adding/editing teams (i.e. networks) via the Database control panel. In this tutorial we approach the same problem using the Team Browser. The Browser is designed to allow the Red Queen administrator (or assigned team editors) to perform team operations by interacting with the team tree, which remains visible on the left of the page in a separate frame.
To get to the Team Browser Kyla enters the administrative area of Red Queen by typing a URL into her web browser something like:
http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/path/to/.../redqueen/do/admin/admin.cgi
She then looks for the Team Browser, which can be accessed from a link on the left side of the navigation bar entitled Teams. When she clicks on it she sees a new page with a bare folder named Home on the left. This represents the top level of the (currently empty) team tree. It should look something like this:
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Home |
Kyla clicks on the Home folder and a single link appears on the right of the page entitled "Add Team". She clicks again and sees a form for adding a team. To create a top-level team named "First Dates" she fills in the form like so:
An asterisk indicates a required field. At a minimum, the team requires a "Name". When a team is created the supplied "Name" field cannot contain the forward slash / as this is the character used to delimit components of a team. If Kyla sets the "Is Validated" field, the created team will appear on public pages. Otherwise it is only accessible to her. If a team "Description" is provided it can be placed on the public pages. It can also be hidden by toggling the appropriate configuration variable from the administrative configuration pages. If a team "Description", or team "Keywords", are provided, these will be used to fill the metadata fields for the team when static pages are built. This helps spiders index your pages more accurately. These two fields also assist in the functioning of the internal Red Queen search engine.
As Kyla does, you should ignore the "Template Prefix" field (consider it an advanced feature which can be used to bypass the default team templates). For now, Kyla also ignores the section of the form containing the "Rating Questions" which control which rating attributes are assigned to the team. To simplify things, this section of the form has been ignored in the current discussion. We will come back to the rating questions later, once the team is created. If desired, an "Image" can also be assigned to the team by clicking on the Manage Upload button and using the dialog box that appears to upload an image. In general, if you want to add an image to each team, it would probably be wise to delay this until you have come up with a series of images, all of the same size and style, which can be used to decorate the teams in a uniform way. For the purposes of our discussion Kyla decides not to bother with team images.
When Kyla submits the Add Team form the team is created and the Team Browser automatically updates to display the new configuration:
  Home |
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First Dates (0) |
The zero in the parentheses on the right of the new First Dates team indicates that there are no members in the team yet. We postpone for the moment the question of how members are assigned to teams (basically they elect to join them), and instead allow Kyla to click on the "Add Team" link on the right of the page to create another team beneath First Dates, to be named Beach Partiers. She goes through the same procedure as before, fills in the form, supplying Beach Partiers for the "Name" field, and submitting. The new First Dates > Beach Partiers team is created, and the Team Browser updates to reflect the team addition:
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Home |
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First Dates (0) |
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Beach Partiers (0) |
It is always a good idea to plan out the intended team tree before one begins adding them to the database. However, teams can be moved or deleted if needed, and Kyla would find the links to perform these operations on the right side of the page once a given team is added. At this point we stop and move onto the next task, which is to define the various rating attributes to associate with each team.
Next Section: ADDING RATING ATTRIBUTES
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