Yet PHProjekt 6 (P6) is already enhanced with nice AJAX workflows and snappy user-experience, but we discussed a way to provide synchronous communication and direct information within the application.
Therefore we spent P6 a new feature called frontend messages. A frontend message is a generated message to the User that appears in a highlighted box at the right bottom. You can separate between two types: system generated and user generated ones. A system generated message or notification is e.g. a user has logged in. A user generated notification is similar to a small chatroom where a user can send a notification to any other user. In ather words, if User A creates a new todo and gives User B the mimimum right of read access, User B gets exactly at the moment after User A has hit the save button a message like, User A has created a new Todo 'write Email' in Project 'Testproject'“. In addition this message is a hyperlink to the new item to see the details.
This is the list of events that trigger a new frontend message:
Login/ Logout
- a user of one of my projects logs in
- a user of one of my projects logs out
Actions on data records
- a new item will be created
- an existing item will be updated
- an existing item will be deleted
Calendar
- Alert upcomming events
- (an invitation will be acepted by the user) not implemented yet, because there is no invitation function in P6)
- (a user receives an invitation to a meeting) see above
- a meeting will be postponed
For those who won´t get any frontend messages exist a tab in the settings to turn off/on this type of notification.
Since the users love the handy system requirements (Apache server and Mysql) and the ease of installation it´s not possible to use a real comet architecture, because all the comet magic depends on a so called application server (e.g. Jetty, Perservere) and does not run on traditional web-servers.
We hope this feature will bring a realtime web feature into P6 and enhance the ease of use of the groupware.
