user-groups in drupal
as i have read a couple of post already adressing the subject of (private) groups within a drupal installation, here my reflections on this subject:
I have done some work on knowledge-communities and how they should be constructed to support knowledge-exchange in an online environmnent. drupal seemed to be doing most of what i needed, only few things were missing. what i needed in addition, was the possibility to
- choose with whom a user wants to share his/her knowledge (my efforts were motivated by k-mgt-reflections, ... therefore the term knowledge). they either can keep it for themselves, share it with one/several knowledge-groups he/she is part of, or share it with the whole userbase of the community
- create knowledge-groups with a shared taxonomy, within the existing community. These groups could be open or private, depending on the needs
- keep a private taxonomy to class all info according to his/her own vision of the world (=taxonomy). so that they could pick out information they define as important and class them personally.
in order to do so, i made another modul, which allowed me to use the vocabularies defined in the taxonomy-module to create my groups. I also coded kind of a navigation interface and called it all the “portal.module”. As I am not much of a coder, it’s all hick-hack so far, but did what i wanted it to do.
For those who wanna take a look at what I am talking about and what the advantage of this could be:
http://connected-brains.wizdom.ch
login: user
password: user
before you login, you only see the vocabulary available to all visitors (even not logged in), which is just a general taxonomy treating .
after login, you have access to two other vocabularies = knowledge-groups. One is called , where i ordered the information from to my personal way of structuring that info. below you see a link, showing who is member of this group, as well as who has taxonomy-admin rights. To enter some content you just need to choose the terms from different vocabularies (you only see those you are member of) to let it appear in different groups. i never promoted anything to front page, and made sure that access to the nodes is only given through help of the taxonomy, in order to make sure that nodes are only visible to selected groups. I’m aware that this is not ideal, but ... well, that’s the best i could do :D
to see how it is all shown to admins, or to get more info, access to the files, etc. ... write me an email:
bb at wizdom dot ch
I’ll be more than happy to be of some help. you did a great job with drupal!!! i just downloaded the newest RC, great :D thanks
for those interested in knowledge exchange in online environments, please take a look @ http://connected-brains.wizdom.ch/node.php?id=115 ... let me know what you think of it.
greetz, bb