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Ned Pajic:
Hi, and welcome to this step-by-step course on how to build a knowledge-based application using Caspio. Before we begin, I’d like to give you a quick agenda of what to expect from each of the videos.
In this video, I will give you a quick application overview so that you know exactly what we plan on developing in the course. In the second video, you will learn how to set up the foundation of your app by creating database tables and establishing relationships between them. In the third video, you will learn how to create views and authentications to properly assign permissions to users and different levels of access. In the fourth video, which will be the bulk of the content, you will learn how to create all the input forms, searchable reports, charts, and some SQL to power the dashboards and more. And in the final video, we will learn how to deploy the entire application onto a website. I highly recommend that you watch all the videos in order because we piggyback on what we do in the prior session.
Now, let’s go ahead and look at the live example of the application we’re going to build in this course. What you’ll notice from this application is that we have the ability to log in either as a user or as an admin. We’re going to take a look at the functionality on both sides, but let’s go ahead and log in as the user first. In my demo today, I’m using Sam. So once I log in as Sam into the application, you’ll notice that it takes me to a dashboard page where Sam can review all the data metrics and key performance indicators pertaining to his account. So here across the top, we can see all the articles that are currently in progress, all the articles that are pending review, any article that needs to be resubmitted for review. As Sam, I can also see how many published articles I have, unpublished, and all the different feedback that I have submitted across all the articles.
What I would like for you to remember is this number zero under in progress. As we make changes inside a knowledge base application, you will see how all of these numbers are affected. So let’s go and add new article, and I’m going to fill this out very quickly. Let’s say sales department, for my title we can say new pricing, and then we’ll just add some sample text. Now, as Sam, I can flag this articles either in progress or if I’m ready for the admin to review my article, I can submit it for review. For now, we’re going to say in progress and click submit. Let’s go back to dashboard. And what you’ll notice now is that we currently have one article that’s in progress.
The way you get to this article is by going to the pending page here you’ll see three different buckets, one that’s currently holding all the articles that are in progress, all the articles that are submitted for review, and any article that needs to be resubmitted for review. Now as Sam, I can go to details for in progress, and here I can update my changes, I can modify any of the text and if I’m happy with it, I can at any point change the status to submit for review, click update. And now you can see how this article moved into this bucket for submitted for review. Let’s go into details and you’ll see that the data is read only. In other words, display only, meaning that once you submit the article for review, you no longer have the ability to update it. Now it’s up to the admin to either approve and publish it or have the user resubmit once again if something is incomplete. Let’s go back to dashboard.
And notice now that we currently have zero articles that are in progress, but we do have one that’s pending review. We’ll take a look and see what this looks like from the admin perspective in just a minute. Let me show you the rest of the functionality for the user. So as a user, I have the ability to search any of the published articles based on different criteria. I can see the results. And if I want to review this article here, the very first one, I can click on details and here I can review the article, but I also have the ability to submit my feedback. Let’s say, for example, this article is outdated, maybe it’s incomplete, or I want to provide some good feedback for the author to let them know, Hey, this is a great article, thank you for contributing. So you go to feedback.
And in this very simple submission form, you can say if it was helpful, not helpful or somewhat. And then you can provide your thoughts upon submission, you can trigger an email to notify the admin, Hey, there’s new feedback in the knowledge base application. Log in to review it and take the necessary steps of either unpublishing in the article, modifying it, or having the user resubmit for review once again. As a user, we also have a different bucket here that shows all the unpublished articles. So if an admin does in fact unpublish an article, I will be able to find those articles here. And then from there, I can also now submit once again for review. As Sam, I can also update my profile. I can change my password and if I no longer have a use for the knowledge base application, or if I’m not doing anything at any point, I can log out and come back when needed.
Now, let’s log in as the admin, who in this demo happens to be John. And as soon as I log in, the admin also is taken into a dashboard view, but the admin has the ability to see all the data in aggregate across all the users. Before we looked at the data just to pertain to Sam. Now the admin is going to be able to see all the data from this knowledge base application inside their dashboard view. So for example, here we can see total number of articles that are pending review. We can see how many published articles we have in this knowledge base, how much feedback we have received, and total number of views across all the articles. So I have one article that’s pending review. Let’s take a look at it into the details. And now the admin can publish the article or have Sam resubmit that article for review.
Let’s just say that we like the article, let’s publish it and hit update. Back to dashboard. We no longer have any articles that are pending review. This went from 21 to 22 and down below Sam currently has 15 articles that are published. The way this number actually changes is based on how many people look at the details of each of the published articles. Let me give you an example. What I want you to do is remember 175, let’s go into details of any of the articles. And once you look at the published article details and you go back to dashboard, you will see this number increase to 176. Another thing that I want to point out is, let’s go back to details.
In this example, we have a one to many relationship where we can look at a parent record and we can see all the child records that are associated with that parent record. So article details, I can see all the feedback that has been submitted for this specific article. In a database environment, this is called a one-to-many relationship that’s split in two different database tables where we link child records to a parent record. And you’re going to learn how to do that in the next couple of videos. As the admin, I also have the ability to add a new article. We can manage all the articles by clicking search, so we see all of the articles. It doesn’t matter what the status is, we can pull any single article with any type of status. Now the difference between the user and the admin, the admin does in fact have the ability to delete an article if needed compared to the user who doesn’t have that capability.
I can also go to details, and if I want to reassign this article to somebody else, I can do that. I can make any of the updates, I can add my internal notes, and I can also change the status at any point. As the admin, I can also add a new user. So if you hire a new employee and you wish to grant this employee access to the knowledge base application, all you need to do is fill out this form, click on submit. That user will receive an email, and now they can log in and also contribute to the knowledge base. As the admin, we can also manage users. So I can go here, click search to view the results. And as you can see inside my demo here, we have two admins and six users, and all of the users in this application are active, meaning they can all log into the application.
If I want to disable somebody’s account, I can go to details and all I need to do is uncheck this box, click on the update button, which I’ve disabled in this demo, and as soon as I click on the update button, Ken will no longer be able to log into the knowledge base application. Also, as the admin, we can update our profile, we can change our password, and at any point we can log out if we no longer need to stay logged inside the application.
So this is the application that we’re going to learn how to build in the next couple of videos. I hope that you’ll take the time to watch each of the videos. One, you’re going to learn how to use the Caspio platform. Two, if you have a need for this knowledge-based application inside your own organization, you’re going to learn how to build it, and you’re going to very quickly be able to implement this application inside your organization.
This application is also available for download, so if you don’t want to build it from scratch, you can quickly download it and you can input it into your Caspio account and you can see how it was created. And three, once you learn how to use the Caspio platform, you can build any kind of application that you want if you’re looking to solve a different problem inside your organization. Thank you for watching the overview video, and I hope that you’ll join me in the next video where I teach you how to build the tables and set up the foundation for this knowledge-based application.
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