Clov is a simple project management package. It offers features such as timesheet management, invoice & expense tracking, a simple task list, and project budgeting.
Clov is designed to integrate seamlessly into an existing site and to be easily customizable/extensible; this is partly accomplished by making use of many built-in Concrete5 features.
The code is heavily commented and taking a peek at the source is encouraged if you can't find enough information here. Feedback, patches, bug reports, etc are very much appreciated.
Clov requires Concrete5 5.6.0.2+ and PHP 5.3+.
Most of Clov's user data is stored in attributes on custom page types. The
"schema" for these page types are laid out in
ClovPackage::getPageTypeSpecifications(). This is a good first place to look
to get an understanding of Clov's data model.
Creation/editing of instances of these page types is handled very similarly to Concrete5's composer feature, except that it happens through a single page interface instead of in the Concrete5 dashboard. Permissions & attributes follow many of the same rules as composer.
To allow fine-grained page permissions, Clov's page type instances inherit permissions from their master collections.
In addition to making heavy use of Concrete5's stock attribute types. Clov implements a few custom types:
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money_amount
A monetary amount, plain and simple. Formatting can be specified with the MONEY_AMOUNT_LOCALE configuration option, whose value should be a standard POSIX locale identifier. You can check which specific locales are supported by taking a look at clov/config/localeconv.utf8.php.
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project
A page of type "clov_project". This is used to tie other Clov pages (e.g. expenses) to specific projects.
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user
Attributes of this type are used to store named user relationships (e.g. user who paid an expense). The user_attribute access entity allows specifying page permissions based on the value of this attribute.
-
users
Exactly like the user attribute type, but can store a list of users in a single attribute (e.g. the project assignees attribute). Also usable with the user_attribute access entity.
The first Clov page you will likely encounter is the dashboard single page, under which all other Clov pages live in the sitemap.
There are also single pages associated with each Clov page type. Page type instances are published underneath their single page, and the single pages are used to list these page type instances as well as to create/edit them (via a composer-like system). Most of Clov's business logic lives in the controllers for these single pages, contrary to the page type instances which generally act as simple sets of attributes that know how to display themselves. For example, the address /clov/projects points to a single page with a list of projects. You would visit /clov/projects/-/add to add a new project ("add" is a controller action), and /clov/projects/project-name to view a particular project.
Clov also comes with a few block types. These are mostly used to filter/list the various page types. The blocks that Clov sets up during installation can be edited/removed for easy customization, and since all pages use standard areas other blocks can be added as well.
Clov implements a custom access entity that allows permissions to depend on the values in user/users page attributes. This is used to restrict permissions based on user-page relationships like task assignee, project managers, etc.
Clov makes use of three user groups: Administrators, Project Managers, and Employees. These groups will be automatically created during Clov's installation if they do not already exist, but they are not removed when uninstalling. The groups are used in permissions and for filtering users. Each user who needs to access Clov should be a member of at least one of these groups.
There is a package configuration file with a few options located at clov/config/package.php. It works similarly to the site.php config file. The file is only used at install time; you can dig into the database to update the options later, but keep in mind that the DEFAULT_TIME_CODES option only matters at install time; changing it won't have the desired effect since the time code attributes have already been created.
Clov's visual design is meant to strike a balance between usability and not clashing with the site theme, erring towards minimalism whenever possible. Selectors used in package CSS are are namespaced to prevent collisions, but some themes' styles may have higher precedence than Clov's and override them.
Clov ships with two small stylesheets:
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basic.css
Styles considered to be necessary; Clov will probably appear visually broken if this stylesheet is left out.
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bling.css
Styles meant to serve as usability enhancements on top of basic.css. If you're interested in reskinning Clov you may want to remove or edit this stylesheet (of course you can always add styles on top of it as well, most of its selectors have fairly low specificity).