By Torenware on

I'm looking into using Organic Groups for a project, but after playing with them a bit, I still don't understand how to use them effectively.

Could any of you recommend some sites or demo sites that use the module well? I know how to install it. But I still don't see what kinds of things it does effectively.

Thanks,
Rob

Comments

laura s’s picture

laura s commented

I cannot point to any specific examples as the only cases I've handled are where the groups were used for more proprietary discussions of the sites in question. Think of it as forums within forums, or sidebar panels.

For example, if you have an organization site, and there's a committee to deal with obtaining custom widgets to sell at an event, for example, you could form a group that has a discussion that is not visible on the main site pages.

On a community site, it could be where you take more controversial topic discussion. On a company site, it could be for project development ... or a support forum for registered members ... or .....

Does this help any?

Laura
pingV

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Torenware’s picture

Torenware commented

At the level you're describing, I get it. But the UI in my tests looked... weird.

Were I going to divide a larger site into "groups", you'd think that you'd want a "group home page", and a hierarchy of menus for various content types. I could not see any way to coerce the module to do this.

It would help a lot for me to actually *see* how these sorts of sites are set up. But it isn't obvious to me how such a site should be set up, or how the site should look to a "group administrator" or to a group member. I also didn't see any intuitive way to administer group membership.

It may well be possible to do these things in the module. But without additional documentation or a demo site, it's unclear what pieces of this puzzle og actually handles.

Rob Thorne
Torenware Networks

Adagio’s picture

Adagio commented

I've tried the og module earlier, and from what I remember it doesn't show very clearly how it works in the UI. But basically a group is a node created as you create ordinary nodes, and is pretty much "invisible". "Under" that node or group, one may put all kinds of nodes if one is member of it, done by "creating content" and choosing which group it should belong to. Nodes put in a particular group will show as they normally do in the taxonomy, with the exception that they may only be seen by members of it's particular group.

Hope this helps and that I didn't write anything wrong :§.

see1975’s picture

see1975 commented

I have installed drupal and organic group several time...
contact me if still have problems

nathandigriz’s picture

nathandigriz commented

If I have a school site with groups

cheerleaders
varsity football
chess club
media and stage
spanish club
cantonese club

Can a node that they have as a group be published to the main sites front page? So if the Media and Stage group has worked on a list of products and event happenings can they then publish it to the forntpage once things have been organized?

How well does the og module work with i18n? Can a group be bilingual? or in a language different from the main site? In other words can the spanish club group be in english and spanish ?

nathandigriz’s picture

nathandigriz commented

No one is using this? Seems strange given the amount of work that went into it.

mackh’s picture

mackh commented

Post Carbon Institute is running a custom version of the OG from May last year. We are in the process of upgrading to the latest verion of ogranic groups and hope to have our 95 existing groups migrated in the coming month.

OG is getting far more feature rich, and although its not immediately apperant, it is possible to customize the groups home page layout through the theme. At the Opencms summit (in Vancouver Feb 7-9 2006) the workshop on usergroups.drupal.org which will be built on OG was very informative, gave me some insights into the underlying issues with OG - notes are here http://drupal.org/node/46636 and detail some of the features the groups developers are working towards.

User contributed modules for forum, integration with CiviCrm, a group book and og2list which enables users to post to the group via email or get mail from the group on postings are great additions.

For more information on how the groups could work for you - check out zacker's screencast http://www.zacker.org/magic-groups-screencast which is a good showcase of the features available.

Check back with http://www.relocalize.net and see how the relocalization groups are coming along, good luck building your groups site

We haven't tried using the locale module with our groups content, so I can't comment on how that works, good luck