I'm in charge of the redesign of a local school's website. I'm looking at Drupal as the primary content-management system of choice for the project. Unfortunately, being a new Drupal user I'm having some trouble working out how to execute the site.
The site has several key features that it needs to have.
- Each teacher needs their own "teacher area" where they can create their own pages and add posts to their own teacher blog
- Teacher areas should be located at a URL *similar* to { http://site.tld/teacher/lastnamefirstinitial/ } and, ideally the blog should be at { http://site.tld/teacher/lastnamefirstinitial/blog/ }
- At this point, the primary navigation (Homepage, About School, Contact Info, Teacher List) will be done as standard HTML - not with a Drupal menu module. The menu module should reflect each of the teacher areas - listing links to pages that the teachers have generated and offer a link to the blog (also the RSS feed, but I suppose if it's possible to do the rest, showing the RSS feed will be easy)
- A simple HTML sidebar module on each page. I'll want to add some small FeedBurner widgets and other things to each teacher area, and also be able to accomodate for any additions that teachers ask about.
- These pages will not have unique themes or anything else different from the main page. One admin panel should be able to manage all the users and themes and all that fun stuff.
If anyone can help me find the best route to enable these features, I'd greatly appreciate it. Whether it's installation of a module, a hack in Drupal (or an existing feature that I'm too blind to see), or moving to a new CMS (I hope not), I'll do what it takes to implement these features.
If there is no module that can do this, it may be possible for me to hire an experienced Drupal programmer to develop one. I'm not positive yet though, so ideally this can be solved through existing means.
Thank you,
Chris Van Patten
Comments
I would consider using the organic groups (og) module
I would consider using the organic groups (og) module as it would allow you to set up each teacher as a group and "attach" their own content (pages) to their own group. There maybe some fine tuning but this should make a good starting point.
As for the primary navigation, I think you are headed for drupal using HTML for the menu and not Drupal's menu system. If straight HTML, the links are not always portable (between say a test site and live site), lack the ability to provide access control.
For the simple HTML sidebar I would suggest using blocks.
students and teachers in organic groups (og)
I'm trying to set up teacher groups with og, but am having a hard time setting access permissions correctly. How do I set things so that the teacher (group admin) see "Create... " type links while students and families see only "View..." type links?
Would I create a separate menu block for each set of users and control the block access with roles?
Create three roles (or maybe
Create three roles (or maybe only two), lets call them 'teacher', 'student' and 'family'. The first question about creating content can be handled by only giving the 'teacher' role the ability to edit/update content.
Blocks already have the ability to control visibility by role(s) so this would be handled "simply" by giving everyone the appropriate role.
If you guys get this to work
If you guys get this to work I would be very much interested in talking to you about it. I've been looking for a solution to teacher pages that I can tie into my drupal setup.
I started by trying to create individual users and permissions for everyone but that became a nightmare very fast.
Kevin