As was pointed out to me in Usage/TS, I've been looking at Gerhard Killreiter's work on expanding the groups and permissions system for Drupal, and mostly I merely wanted to comment and encourage him to pursue this specific path, at least to the extent that I understand it.
It was argued earlier that making individual Group Permissions too granular that there was a risk of making user management an unwieldly task, however this is easily solved merely by leaving everyone solely assigned to a generic 'user' group and simply assigning it all the permissions you'd want general users having.
What I wanted to interject is that it's also worthwhile to consider Groups and Permissions as a Community Building feature, beyond granular user management. Where users have the ability to create and control Groups and Group-Only Content, it provides them with a socially creative tool and recognizes the fact that not all users belong in the same catagory.
Comments
Thanks
for the encouragement!
A comment:
Where users have the ability to create and control Groups
This is currently not possible. This is due to the fact that the taxonomy module has currently only a rather generic "administer taxonomy" permission.
Hmm, as I write this I am thinking of a possibility to extend this. You could give a user the right to create terms below a specific terms in a given vocabulary.
The problem is that the admin interface for something like this would need to be written and I still have to wreite the one for the generic group permission interface.
--
Drupal services
My Drupal services
Hey, it's cool stuff!
From a practical perspective, just making users into moderators/aides is just an efficient way to go. For a while, I offered to make anyone that contributed stories to my nuke site an administrator; in addition to letting them validate and publish new stories as they came in when I wasn't around to do it myself, it also opened up a lot of the administrator functions as creative tools, which in turn gave them more power to create content. So long as no one could do anything destructive or annoy anyone excessively, I wasn't worried about it.
Again, though, I'm focused on the idea of a web site as a community, due to my background with BBS', and on that note, while I don't necessarily approve, realistically I also know that in social environments people form cliques. While it's generally the kind of thing I prefer to avoid, I also acknowledge that there's a reality behind it, and that in most instances it's better to split up groups that clash rather than simply ordering them not to clash.
Ironically, I'm also a large part of the reason this feature would appeal to my users; I am not universally loved. *Grin* Theme-wise, my site largely consists of political and media-oriented discussion, and I have a very strong left-wing, anti-this-that-and-the-other bias. The reason this is a problem is simply that I 'overshadow' a lot of the people that remain lurkers. I suppose I should simply learn not to stick my nose in and comment on everything that goes on on my site, but since the people in question won't actually go so far as to SAY I shouldn't, it's hard not to stop at everyone's porch and BS a little before moving down the road...
[Edit]
I also wanted to mention that I have not yet figured out how permissions connect to taxonomy, although I've only played with taxonomy to the extent required to set up forums, create a glossary, etc. -- I'll have to make a point of figuring this out later.
Some points
Some points
-cliques
Well, I have a site for a real-world organization which is organized in branches. So I already know I have cliques.
- anti-this-that-and-the-other bias
Your users would /love/ my site. *g*
- permissions connect to taxonomy
They don't until now.
--
Drupal services
My Drupal services