Specifying folders for UGC

Rhythmyx Technical Discussion
1

We are a membership organisation, and many of our volunteers use Rhythmyx remotely to provide Web areas relating to their local “branch” activities. This distributed user base makes training and support more difficult. Also, there are issues of reasonable expectation around volunteers’ time. As a result, take-up is slowing down with 60-70% of the volunteers still to go.

In practice, many volunteers just want to add their local events to the system. Since this is a repetitive task, learning the full Content Explorer is not necessary. We are envisaging instead a form to create new event content items, and then Active Assembly to edit or update them. All Ephox work would be in Active Assembly.

We can use the UGC modules in the form. However, the servlet configuration specifies a fixed folder in which all content will be created. We would rather have the content in one folder per branch (partly, but not solely, because we are talking about up to 900 events a year, and that’s too many for Content Explorer to handle well in one folder, so we’d have trouble providing support). Therefore, we want a way to configure the system to put UGC in folders set on a per-user basis.

Broadly, each volunteer is the editor for a different branch, although any one branch may very well have a second editor. We don’t necessarily need the users to be able to specify their own folders - any such select list could be 90 items long (the number of branches we have worldwide), and be a pain for the editors to have to use every time. Having a per-user default that could optionally be changed by the user might be a bonus.

We’ve considered a separate configuration for every user, but that of course would be an administrative nightmare.

Of course, we’d also have to consider any knock-on effects on our existing use of UGC and where that is created.

Hope this is clear. Any suggestions welcome.

2

David,

The best approach is probably to use the “sys_folderid” pseudo-field in the UGC form. If this field is present, it is interpreted as either the numeric folder id (e.g. 457) or the folder path (e.g. “//Sites/MySite/some/folder/”). You do not need to change the configuration of the UGC servlet to add items to a different folder.

In your case, I can think of several ways to populate this field.

  1. You can provide a dropdown / combobox on the form and use a cookie (and some JavaScript) to populate the combobox when the user returns to the form. That way, the user must select the value only once.

  2. You can publish (or create) a separate form for each branch, each with it’s own built in folder path. If these forms are published by Rhythmyx, you can use the parent folder path function to generate the path.

  3. Since your users are logged in, you could add a RequestValuesProcessor class to the UGC configuration. This processor would then look up the proper value based on the remote user name (of course, there would have to be a table someplace where the UGC processor can see it).

I think the Cookie/JavaScript approach is probably the easiest.

Dave