By ShutterFreak on

Hi all,

I want to set up a number of "closed" groups each having one or more private forums. Users can become member of a group upon approval of their membership. My environment is Drupal 5.1.

So far I've installed Organic Groups and OG Forums modules, which nearly fulfills my needs, but I cannot restrict a group's forum visibility to group members.

I also tried the Forum Access module (requires ACL) but it assigns visibility only per role, not per group.

I understand that Organic Groups and Taxonomy Access cannot function together, so I did not try out that scenario.

Could someone tell me what I did wrong in my approach, or point me to a working alternative?

Best regards,

Olivier

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

ShutterFreak’s picture

ShutterFreak commented

I found an OG issue under discussion (private groups) in the Organic Groups issue tracking and followup system. Does this mean there's currently no support for private forums in Organic Groups?

Best regards,

Olivier

pwolanin’s picture

pwolanin commented

In 5.x the Node Access Arbiter code is in core. So, in theory multiple node access modules (e.g. OG and TAC) can work together. Note also that you don't need to enable the node access functions of OG unless you need them for some other purpose.

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Work: BioRAFT

ShutterFreak’s picture

ShutterFreak commented

I infer from your reply that it's possible to do arbitration between node access schemes. This could possibly mean that Taxonomy Access and the node access functionality of Organic Groups could cooperate.

Would it then be possible to manage different closed organic groups without the node access functionality provided by the Organic Groups module? Maybe I don't understand what its node access functionality really does...

pwolanin’s picture

pwolanin commented

OG groups can be closed, meaning no one can join (and hence post).

This is very separate from node access where (in the case of OG) a user not in the group cannot read/view a post in a group where they are not a member (unless it's marked "Public"). Essentially, if most or all of the posts to groups are public, you probably don't need OG's node access features.

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Work: BioRAFT

ShutterFreak’s picture

ShutterFreak commented

I see.

In my case I will need the node access functionality then, since the "closed" groups mean two things: users have to be approved, and group content is private to the group. I now understand the latter requires Organic Group node access to be active.

Hmmmm... so the forum problem still needs to find a workaround. I'm hoping an existing module (or possibly a functioning patch)will do the job, but I'm still not sure which one would do the job, if I want to have a number of group-private forums.

ShutterFreak’s picture

ShutterFreak commented

After some further testing, I came to the conclusion that:

  • Forum topics sent by users that are member of only one organic group correctly have the group's audience preset. Those posts are only visible to that organic group.
  • If a member belongs to more than one organic group, then there's always a list of audiences to choose from. the problem is that the default setting is "no audiences" (no check marks), which defaults to "public". This is not the intended behavior for my use case.

Would it be possible to restrict the audience to the group where the forum belongs (instead of providing a list of audiences)? Which code changes should be needed for doing so?

Best regards,

Olivier

pwolanin’s picture

pwolanin commented

check the OG settings page- you can disallow making posts public.

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Work: BioRAFT

ShutterFreak’s picture

ShutterFreak commented

The visibility of posts (OG settings, section: Node authoring form) was set to "Visible only within the targeted groups". I have set it to "Visibility chosen by author/editor using a checkbox on the posting form. Checkbox defaults to Private." which works!

At the same time this fixes another issue, where the default forum was not selected...

Thanks a lot to all for your input!

Cheers,

Olivier

nessumsara’s picture

nessumsara commented

I'm just trying to prevent an authenticated user who is not subscribed to a group from accessing that group's homepage. I have OG node access enabled, but have not found a way to block authenticated users form being able to see a list of all group homepages. Also, I tried using the "Menu Per Role" module to eliminate access to the "Groups" navigation menu item, but it still shows up.

pwolanin’s picture

pwolanin commented

the maintainer of OG (Moshe) announced that private home group pages is a coming feature- check the OG issue queue for a patch.

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pelicani’s picture

pelicani commented

You can indicate whether a group is listed on the groups page within the edit form of a group.
"list in groups directory : Should this group appear on the list of groups page?"

But you can still view the group home page if you know the url.
I've been tinkering with the node_access table to see if changing the realm will prevent this action for non subscribers.

Web Developer : RockRiverStar.com : Philadelphia, PA

Technical Architect : Philadelphia, PA

ShutterFreak’s picture

ShutterFreak commented

A number of patches has been posted on the og_forum support pages. I have been experimenting with a couple of them, but so far there's no working implementation yet for the "closed" OG Forums.

I have started from version 1.11.2.6, then I upgraded to version 1.11.2.11 (via CVS web interface, branch DRUPAL 5.x), then started adding the patches by hand.

I can't attach a patch to a post, so I uploaded my latest attempt on my website. The input for this patch comes from the following patches from the og_forum suppport:

There's still work on it, but I won't really have time to work on it. I only hope this work will be useful to the og_forum developers.

Regards,

Olivier

ShutterFreak’s picture

ShutterFreak commented

I think I found a workaround, which fixes a number of things, including the "post a forum topic" message where it doesn't belong. It also collapses the forum list dropdown in the "post a new topic" page by default.

I patched the following files (links go to patched versions on my website):

  1. forum.module (patched - 42kb): this is a rather minimal patch. It checks if the og_forum module exists, and then uses portions of that module's code instead of the forum module's code.
  2. og_forum.module (patched - 25kb): this patch is a bit larger. I added portions from my previous attempt in a more 'directed' manner.

In order to make things work, I don't exclude any content from the Audience feature and set all groups to "moderated subscription". If you're not a member of a given group, you can't access the group's forum.

There are still no provisions for adding extra forums in an organic group (but this was also true in code before my patch).

Maybe this is stuff that the og_forum and forum module developers may want to look at :)

Regards, and many thanks for your reactions!

Olivier

ShutterFreak’s picture

ShutterFreak commented

But if you create one group where all users get automatic registered, and put a forum in there, this problem is solved.

I still don't know how several forums can be added to an organic group's forum list, though. Probably some taxonomy magic is required.

Best regards,

Olivier

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

See the new 2.x dev version of og_forum.

The CVS version is up to date with the tarball on the main page lagging by up to 12 hours.

If there are any further issues, please post to the issue queue.

Thanks.