"StepByStep" is a Plone-addon for managing processes, including collaboration, setting priority, track time (start, pause, stop), assign responsibilities and get overviews and reports.

A lot of ticket-systems have difficulties when it comes to representing priority, cluster tickets as subtickets of a ticket, and assigning user-permissions. The latter is Plone's strength, let's take advantage of it.

Because multi-tasking is a myth, as it is provenly not possible to focus on several things at once. Provide a tool, helping to enforce doing things step by step and focus with devotion on each step, one at a time, by inhibiting to be active on several steps at once.

Be able to navigate very quickly through items by using the tab-key and when hitting a selected item, show children and also grand-children, if tabbing further. Tabbing backwards after page-load, will focus the edit-buttons at bottom, immediately. You can also use the mouse and click your way, of course.

Don't reinvent the wheel, take what Plone has already, be as less intrusive as possible, follow the usual conventions, so users can instantly understand what is going on. Avoid unnecessary complexity.

Be fully functional also when Javascript is not available or disabled in the browser. Enhance progressively, mobile-devices first. That guarantees most possible robustness and is the best foundation for providing a good accessibility after the W3C-recommendations.

Add a step, name it after a project or anything you like, it is then the root-step for containing all substeps. A step conatining child-steps is regarded to be a process.

By default the creator of a step will be the reponsible person. You can edit the step and change the person in the responsibles-field of the 'persons'-tab, or even add several persons. If so, the first person is regarded to be the main responsible one.

Simply change the order of steps in the folder-contents-view, according to their importance. The order rules, work on one step after the other. If a step contains children-steps, they have to be finished one after the other before you can step further to the parent-step's next sibling.

To work together on a step and its substeps, we can use Plone's usual way to set permissions: Click the sharing-tab on a step, select users or groups and tick the boxes on 'Can add, 'Can edit' and 'Can view', as wanted. The 'Can review'-permission is not relevant here, anyone who can edit a step can also change its workflow-state.

Add substeps in step, e.g. you have a main-step 'Make coffee' and it has child-steps 'Cook water', 'Crush beans', 'Pour water over', etc.

Click the 'Play'-button when starting to work on a step, click 'Pause' when making a break and click 'Stop', when the finishing a step.

You can use the 'effective'-date-field for defining when a step is supposed to be started and the 'expiration'-date-field, when a step is supposed to be finished. If a step is expired or contains expired child-steps, a warning in its header-area is shown.

In step's folder-contents-view click 'Add new' and select 'File'.

Create your own reports (predefined searchresults) by adding collections and setting their criteria as you wish.

[To do]

Stepbystep ID's -----------A stepbystep index-number is stored in the registry, it is increased by one (+1) on each creation of a stepbystep and sets this number as the identifier (id) of a stepbystep.

This is a convention to ease referencing stepbystep.

If a user enters an Integer as the Title in any other ATContentType, its Id gets 'n' as prefix, to exclude ambiguity.