I work for a company that generates calendars for professionals and we'd like our users to synchronize their calendar on their phone for simplicity's sake. We initially had an ICS file, but we started hitting issues out of our control and we're looking to switch to a full CalDav support.
However, the steps necessary to create a CalDav account can be a bit tedious
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfPtH8fOLfw ) especially since in our mobile app, we already have an authentified user, we were wondering if there was any way we could do the setup for the user, so he/she doesn't have to switch back and forth to copy/paste the CalDav Account Credentials.
Surprisingly, we've found nothing. No NPM package, no way to simplify this. We did found a way to generate a configuration profile with the data, but we were told to steer clear this idea since some of our customers may be using a company-provided phone and it was possible to prevent any sort of installation through configuration profiles.
Anyone has an idea on how we can make it simple for our users and give them the best UX as possible ?
Thanks :)
Related
I'm submitting my first app through iTunes Connect. It is a social networking community so I have to provide a demo account for the submission. My app already has a live database of users as there is currently an active web version.
I'm new to this and confused as to how I should handle this. Should I be creating a demo account that will not show up in any other live user's search results? Are the testers going to be attempting to interact with other live users? I am assuming I will need to show the various functions of the app, like messaging and events. In that case should I be creating a few "demo" users for the testers to interact with?
Alternatively, should I be linking them to the development version and development database? If that's the case, then the build that I send them would only be a development build then?
I am confused on how this is supposed to work and can't seem to find any information to help?
In my experience, you'll need to give them the production version that will go into the store. So not the development build.
When we submit an app for approval, it seems to get installed and activated on a couple of devices, but nothing much ever happens. They barely use it, as far as we can tell. We can tell that it's installed and run. We have previously been rejected when the network connectivity wasn't working right, so we know that they do look at the app after it's installed.
I'd suggest you make them an account that looks relatively anonymous (or even "Test Account" which you real users are hardly likely to try to interact with). You could create another account and say "If you want to send a message, send it to account xxxx". We've never had them interact with our app enough to utilise the suggestions we've made.
If you have an active / inactive flag, you could think about making these accounts inactive once the app is approved, then re-activating it when you next want to submit your app.
My company uses Quick Books Online for its accounting, and that's where we go to log our time against projects. In an effort to make time entry easier, and a way to learn how to write a Windows 8 Metro app, I thought it would be a useful project that simplified time tracking, application that could automatically submit my time to QB. The thought would be users would use their own QBO logins so it would be able to see their time entries.
I have been looking around the api for QBOE and can't seem to tell if its possible to connect to a QBOE account with non admin credentials. Is what I am thinking even possible?
No, this is not possible. You will need something in the middle to talk between QB and your application.
There are a number of different timesheet apps on appcenter that you might look at. https://appcenter.intuit.com/category/time-tracking
This has been something I have been trying to work on for a good long time. It first started with Prestashop as an integration with other scripts or pieces of the puzzle I needed to make for an overall website. I am currently still using Prestashop as my webstore but have since switched to Magento.
I switched to Magento because of it's complex flexibility and because overall I think it is the best solution, best backing and best overall eCommerce script to go with.
That being said, the same issues I was having with Prestashop appear to be the same I will continue to have any in aspect that I try to integrate things together in perfect harmony.
I have Magento setup, as the main portion of the website, and inside Magento in sub folders I have Wordpress installed in a folder called "articles" and I have also went with FluxBB as my message forums because of it's simplicity in not having a crap load of bloated extra features that I could care less about and that is in a sub folder called "forums".
From this point, we know that Magento, Wordpress and FluxBB all have their own way of managing users; creating, managing, and tracking them.
What I am wanting to do is find the best way to fit these three and more together for my website to make the experience for the customer as smooth and as functional as possible. After emailing the ever talented and helpful Alan Storm, he told me the best solution he was aware of working was to make a third party user management that they all point to and it manages the customers authentication. I do believe his thoughts may be the best but I wanted to put this out there here on StackOverFlow and I may post this on Magento as well to get the broad scrope of magento developers and smart guys that like challenges.
I have several thoughts, none may work, some may work half ass, or one may just be something workable. But first let me tell you what I have accomplished so far. I have done the necessary steps to integrate my overall design for the header and footer, so essentially Wordpress and FluxBB are wrapped and are contained inside Magento's outer design layer. So with that being said I have also made it where Magento will check the session to see if the user is logged in to Magento or not by saying "Hello Guest" or "Hello User". This is where I have hit a stopping point because I am out of my depth and would like assistance, whether it is something we create together out of pure challengeness or someone says if I pay them they will help me, either way I would like this accomplished. If and when I get the code figured out whether by means of paying for assistance of a group effort I would like to make it freely available for others to use the concept for their own projects.
Brain Fart #1:
Adjust the user tables for both Wordpress and FluxBB to conform more to the structure of Magento, as for the password and username/email login portion. The rest of the fields can respectively stay as they are for post counts, and etc.
From there, I would like to figure out which class in Magento does the actual input into the database when a customer is created out of registration. When I find that code, I would like to extend upon it the ability to copy the user credentials into the other two tables in the database for Wordpress and FluxBB. If necessary it can just be an added couple of fields to Wordpress and FluxBB if that seems like a better idea and yes I do mean the actual encrypted password that Magento creates, I want this to be secure as well.
From there, when we know that a customer registers with Magento the data is copied over to the other two tables then we at least have made progress, whether this progress will actually work, is still to be determined.
We then disable the login/logout and registration links in any way that we can from Wordpress and FluxBB because they will no longer be needed because we want the user to register, login and logout through one location which is Magento.
Then comes the fun part in my eyes, keep the damn session going throughout the entire website as they order products, review wordpress articles and possibly leave comments, send to friends and etc.... as well as post topics, replies and etc in the FluxBB capacity.
To me this is where the creating the fields or adding the data from Magento's customer registration comes into play, I can make it check to see if they are logged into Magento already and from there we may be able to have it validate itself. This may be over kill or this may just be how it needs to be done. But to me if the credentials are located in all three databases then they should be able to be validated by changing the code in Wordpress and FluxBB or adding code. And Yes I am aware that we will also have to do something about Profile Editing and Password Editing if a customer so desires to change their information.
But that is my first thought on this whether it is the right decision or not, I would like hear from the vast knowledge of people here who have more experience and knowledge than I get with Magento, PHP and everything else.
Brain Fart #2
This illogical idea seems like an outside stretch entirely to me because of the complexity of Magento and how it is overall setup.
But the idea is to remove/edit the Wordpress and FluxBB (and any other third party software) to pretty much ignore it's own method of registration, login, logout, edit and look to Magento for it's credentials and establishing new customers. Essentially making them an oversized module of Magento.
I just know that the way Magento is setup is to be modulerized and its complexity seems like it would take a lot more coding and troubleshooting to do this.
Brain Fart #3
Dump both Wordpress and FluxBB and look towards modules in the Magento Connection Store that pretty much has all of the functionality that I need and can add to them what is missing and not mess with trying to integrate third party software.
I love Wordpress, I think replicating it with a module, at least after the hours I have spent looking at all of the modules available that are CMS/News related is a tough call. FluxBB I could take it or leave it, if someone had an already viable solution to use phpBB or vBulletin or SimpleMachines I would go with them. I rather it be free open source software, not because I am a cheap skate but just because I support open source as much as I can.
Brain Fart #4
Can this be a cookie this, but would only be effective if they allow cookies, or could somehow addon to the session to allow things to pass through but Magento sets up different sessions or allows you too so they things to crash against each other so this may not at all be an idea or may be one as well.
I know I am not giving examples of things I have tried, files I have looked at or anything related to that and I apologize, I provide some links related but nothing specifically found so far that matches what I am trying to accomplish. And I have tried to merge things together with some fun disastrous results.
Link Examples?:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/doc/webservices-api/api/customer#customer.create
http://www.magentogarden.com/blog/how-are-passwords-encrypted-in-magento.html
http://www.nicksays.co.uk/magento_events_cheat_sheet/
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/5_-_modules_and_development/customers_and_accounts/registration_fields
How to access Magento customer's session from outside Magento?
Any assistance with this would be nice, I am trying to work on several parts of the website at once and this one is troublesome and I would say that everyone is going to find it hard or have found it hard. Anyone like challenges? :)
--------- EDIT:
I have got Magento and Wordpress to work perfectly together with James Kemp's module found on CodeCanyon's website (Single Sign-On for Magento and Wordpress) and I am going to adapt it to work for FluxBB or anything else I do.
Just passing along the information... I see this was edited, don't know what was edited and don't care. Just passing along information I have since found since posting this.
I am managing/customizing a combo of magento+vanilla forums+a custom app made in Yii framework. The users are "shared" between the apps. None of the two links are good. As Alan already replied to you, the correct SSO will be with an external user database/manager. But well, not everyone is up to recoding three apps just to get 1 post a week forum and 1 article a month blog to work with magento. So we are left with less options. First of all, if you don't want (most probably not) to rewrite a good portion of already written open source project that is being updated and maintained and then maintain your changes against periodical updates (you want them), then you have to duplicate the user data over three databases. Unless the project you adapt has some way to manage users data as plugin or external module. AFAIK both of your choice don't.
So, how to implement it? Assuming you choose Magento as mother-of-all, you need it to export an API for authentication, which may work over browser using cookies and javascript but this is rather tricky, or you can use it's frontend cookie to validate the sessions doing server-server API requests from children apps. This is a preferred option as far as "classical" SSO goes. Technically, what should happen when your users open forum or blog, the respective apps detect magento's cookie and check if the session is valid and who is the user. If the user is found, his data is copied to the blog or forum tables. Then you need to start an authenticated session on blog or forum app using the newly created user record.
So far so good, but yet some work. you need to disable the user profiles management in the children apps or modify it so the data held in Magento is always the correct one and you need to invent something to synchronize the Magento's representation of user profile down to the children. This is better to be hooked up on Magento's events so every time a user changes his profile the data is updated in the children app. But there is another but too. You probably want to keep some data app specific, a display name on the forum is not necessary the FirstName+LastName from the Magento and some would like to keep it private.
The above is just what I can recall as interesting facts about keeping it running. There are certainly many other things I've left out, more or less specific. But hopefully my comment can help your brain farting.
We've tried to evaluate other options but anything without duplicate data seems to be too expensive to implement or to maintain. Maybe later. With budget and time.
This is a problem that every developer will face when building their apps: how to contact the reviewer of your app to notify them of an update, new release, help topics, etc?
Some things I am thinking:
Include an RSS feed in your app which you can update to notify the users of the app.
Include a twitter feed regarding your app. How to go about this?
Include a way for the users to subscribe to a mailing list. This way, I can send a mass-email to the users who opted-in? Any suggestions here?
Any other ways that you think this can/should be done? Any existing solutions you can point me to will be great. Thanks in advance.
One way, for contacting a specific user who created a review of an application is to go to Zune Social (at http://social.zune.net/home) and create a new message. You can then enter the Zune Tag of the user who created a review.
Personally, I'd try to do all three - have a web page/site, with an RSS feed, and a subscription link (so they can subscribe to the RSS feed via email) and then post any updates to your twitter account as well.
You can't really force a user to do any of these, but having the options available, and linked from inside your app on the about page is probably good practise.
You could also include some kind of "Update Available" feature inside the application. Try to make this as unobtrusive as possible obviously. Obviously if they've still got the app installed they'll get an update notification from the marketplace anyway.
Sam
Besides the suggestions made by samjudson, I'll also recommend having a support-page with a direct option to send a email to you. Here's a example of a support-page from one of my applications. I've received lot of emails with suggestions for improvements, or complains about bugs. And since it's by email, it gives you the option to respond directly to people.
Another thing about reviews. Don't take them to serious. Most people only rate negatively (since humans like to complain), and by such a lot of reviews are often misinformed, outdated, or the users just been plain ignorant.
Alright. So I am new, I know my way around html pretty well, and have gotten by for a while now doing so. But today I am presented with a seemingly simple issue.
My client needs the ability for users to create their own LOGIN/PASSWORD, my client wants to be able to MANUALLY approve visitors. And he want to be able to track how many times they login.
The login section will just be about 4 pages of PDF file downloads.
I cant imagine this is the hardest thing in the world, I just have no clue where to even start. Perhaps there is a code already written, as things like this are done every day using forum technologies...
Please help!
It may also help to mention that I am using Dreamweaver cs4 on a MAC
I'd check out Ruby on Rails if I were you. It's pretty easy to get something quick up with it that you can have users create accounts with that send e-mails to the client with approve/reject options, and be able to track downloads and users via MySQL or other databases.
I've found Agile Development with Rails to be a great source of info on how to do stuff like this (they do an online bookstore as the book's example) and with a little modification I think it should work for what you say you want to do (and the book is pretty cheap as far as programming books go).
If you want just really basic static login features without lots of coding, you can start with Password protecting your pages with htaccess. You can password protect directories like this without any effort at all. This way, you can be sure that your login routine is secure.
Then, you can continue with advanced features like account administration and login statistics. These will require some programming skills.
Tracking count of user logins should be easy too. You can put simple PHP code to the source of protected pages that will save the info about login to the database. This will require you to study some basics of databases. You can use plaintext files which is not as clean but much easier and it will allow you to export info for your client more easily.
If you want to do it profesionally, you should invest in learning about web development or hire someone to do it for you. These tasks might not be trivial.
Have you worked with PHP, ASP.Net or some other web language yet? What you're trying to isn't too difficult in the grand scheme of things but it may be somewhat challenging if you haven't programmed before and/or haven't had any experience with web development.
(P.s. Alter your question as a response and comment on my answer when you're finished.)
As you are looking into Ruby on Rails, take a look at bort which is a RoR app skeletton with RESTful authentication included, it should help (Chris Bunch answered on the general RoR question).
There is also this bort fork. There is also Authlogic which may be easier to work with.
Have a look at the ASP.net Membership provider and also the login controls which provides the UI for the login as well as registration screens out of the box.
Here is a Multipart Series on ASP.NET's Membership, Roles, and Profile
If this is too complex than probably you can also design you application from scratch using ASP.net. If you don't know asp.net than the best place to start is www.asp.net it has several videos and tutorials which would help you get going soon.