Joomla Extensions Components Assessments
Assessments
Background
The Assessments component was designed initially to allow trained personal fitness and nutrition advisors to provide personalised health and fitness advice to users of their website. The component is designed in such a way that multiple Assessment Types can be created, maintained and operate completely independantly of each other. This makes the model very flexible and suitable to be adapted in the future to handling more complicated assessment challenges or those involving very different subject material.
Technicalities
A big aspect of this component are the user questionnaire forms. These must all be created and maintained using ChronoForms - an excellent Form creater component for Joomla. Without the excellent help from Max and Bob about how best to hack up their code on the ChronoEngine forum also, this component may never have been fully realised.
Another aspect to this component is the chargable nature of the Assessments in this instance. This could have been handled in a number of different ways but we decided to use the Vodes component from www.sakic.net. This is a simple credits component which connects to PayPal in order to receive payments from users. It was also straightforward to integrate this code into the Assessments component to deduct credits/vodes when a new Assessment is then opened.
The initial set up of the component goes something like:
- Install the component
- Apply hacks to the chronocontact.php and chronocontact.html.php files from the ChronoForm component
- In the admin area, go to the ChronoForm component and create a new form - this will be the user's questionnaire
- Create a new Assessment Type in the Assessments component
- Link the user's questionnaire
- Create an Analysis template for Assessors to complete when returning information to the user
- Add some assessors
- Create a new menu item linking to this Assessment Type
- Wait for users to request an assessment
The flow from the user's POV follows this basic structure:
- Log into the site and decide to request a professional (eg Dietary) Assessment
- Choose Assessor
- Complete questionnaire - included on the form is the option to attach documents and image. This questionnaire may be revisited as often as the user wishes; progress is saved to the database continually. When the user is happy they click 'Submit'.
- Email confirmation is received by both the user and the Assessor (and, if configured, any Super Administrators of the site)
- The Assessor completes the analysis
- The user can now access his/her completed and returned (eg Dietary) Assessment from the same page they opened it from.
Fully configurable (from the back-end) emails get sent out on 3 events to (if specified) 3 different recipients - The User, The Assessor and Any Super Administrators.
- When a user opens a new Assessment
- When a user submits the Assessment
- When the Assessor returns the Analysis to the user
Demo & Downloads
Unfortunately it would not have been plausible to rewrite this entire application for standalone purposes due to the significant site-specific customisation (with respect to custom fields pulled in from Community Builder for user information) and hacks done to other files (such as the ChronoForms files).
If you would like to see something similar on your site get in touch with us and we can discuss the possible solutions.
Comments
I am interesting in setting this up on my website, please can you provide a quote and/or the code..
Thank you once again