okay, so here's the idea: i saw ostatic.com (om malik's new open source site) - it's built on drupal, and he's using (i believe) both faq and faq ask to support his 'member questions' section...

i'm attempting the same thing: ALL users can ask a question and ALL or ANY user can answer (only for registered users, no anonymous access beyond viewing questons/answers

...so i configured the whole thing for a community site and here's the example i'll use:

taxonomy vocab is called "Questions" and 3 vocab items are "Elementary Schools" Middle Schools, and High School - for a town, so any parent may ask about any school by age and so on (this is a crude example)

as it is now, any user can answer any question in any category (which is great) and view them all and so on..

BUT i may approach a principal or teacher about being a category EXPERT by creating a new User Type called 'Expert' and manually adding the individual principal to the group...i have not done this yet.

as it is now, any authenticated user can be answering questions - but when i add an EXPERT User Type for a category, will others still be able to answer??? or will this simply allow all users AND expert to continue to answer BUT allow for notification of the expert as well as an option to ask *only* the expert if that is of interest?

i'm a bit confused - overall it is working just great, no bugs, nothing like that, just workflow questions...

Comments

nancydru’s picture

nancydru
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Location Boston
commented

This is an approach I hadn't considered, but I think most of this will work. A bit of terminology here: Anyone who can answer is an expert. While I originally wrote this with the idea of having an "expert" role, the module considers any role chosen to answer as an expert role, regardless of its name. So if you choose "authenticated user" as a role that can answer questions, then all users are "experts." I would dearly hope that if you do this that you do not choose to notify the experts when a question is posted - it would send email to every registered user.

I'm still looking at everything you want here to see if there's something I need to test and maybe modify. I do think you're getting close to the "multiple answer" scenario mentioned in http://drupal.org/node/220434.

-------------------------------------------------------
See also the discussion in http://drupal.org/node/229954.
ostatic is not Drupal.

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

btw, posted in other thread: ostatic IS drupal: http://changingway.org/2008/03/04/ostatic-gigaom-on-open-source/

at any rate, i am certainly NOT going to turn on notifications unless there is a very specific category with very limited experts (the 'not everybody' scenario) - and besides, i'm using d6.1 - notifications module isn't ready yet (or does this module handle it's own notifications?)

btw, another random question (and possible feature request) - any way to have a user check a little button like 'notify me if people answer MY question' - ? just like experts notification, but the other way = to the user who posted...

nancydru’s picture

nancydru
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Primary language English
Location Boston
commented

This module does its own notifications.

"Notify asker" is already requested and will be available only in the 6.x version, where the framework for doing it is already done. One serious design question is the settings page. I want to be able to have the admin define the text for both notifications, which further complicates the settings. I may have to change to a separate settings function for Faq_Ask.

If the site IS Drupal, it is very well disguised. Most Drupal site designers will be happy to tell you at least which modules they used, and usually even more details.

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

thanks - another thing to consider is simply melding the two notifications like "you are receiving this notification because you are the expert on %site or because you are the individual who asked this question and a reply has been posted" - kind of crude, but could get the job done for a version 1...

as for ostatic.com- what's really interesting is that the pages appear to be interfaces to search queries - so for example, look at the path for 'member questions' - it's /searchtag/all....and the others are also searchtag commands - then they link to the nodes...sort of odd, thinking of putting it out to the drupal community in a new forum called, "hey experts, how'd they do this?" and see what people come up with for modules (offered and custom) and so on...

i've already pinged om (creator) asking him to tell the devs that if the whole site is about open source then should walk the walk and come back to drupal and talk about what they did with it (duh, seems obvious right?)

nancydru’s picture

nancydru
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commented

Read http://drupal.org/node/195322 and http://drupal.org/node/198828. You will see that the notification requirements are quite different. But the real issue for me is the settings page(s) and the time it will take to get it designed and done.

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

seems redundant for you to rebuild what notifications are already doing - what i mean is that faq-ask publishes and becomes a node when answered, so perhaps the real hook is to auto-subscribe the 'question asker' (by email) using the 'subscriptions' or 'notify' modules that already allow for one to subscribe by node...in this scenario, it would require that a user be registered and authenticated (at the very least)..

does that make sense? you've already built an outstanding notification to go to experts - but why grapple with notifications for what is essentially a published node (an answered question) when other modules already allow for subscriptions to such nodes (not all are d6-ready, but that's another issue)...sorry, was just rethinking this as i read that post about 'notifying people who ask' - and i do NOT think that anonymous users should be able to get notified of answers (or post questions) but whatever...a lot of wordpress installs work this way...

nancydru’s picture

nancydru
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commented

http://drupal.org/node/191881 - Subscriptions does not handle unpublished nodes. I have no experience with Notify. At this point 50% of what it takes to notify them is already in place. I originally tried to have another module do the notifications and it wouldn't; I'm not going back right now and revisiting this decision.

Whether you think anonymous users should be notified is your choice when this comes out. The original requester wants them to be notified to drive them back to the site and get them to become registered. I understand and appreciate this requirement, so I will implement it as an option.

If someone has knowledge of how to use, perhaps, Actions, I might consider using it, since it is core.

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

actuallly, comment notify module may solve this specific problem for one audience of users - a question is answered, published, and a user can then subscribe to any pursuant discussions or comments...

as for implementation, i spent some serious time doing a walkthrough of how this would be used on my site last night and realized that i DO want to limit use of this particular module to ONLY experts in very select categories - a real 'ask the experts' module where there's a page of experts and links to 'ask them questions' (and not in navigation - just direct to expert, as it sounds like it was meant to be)

for 'general questions' in broader categories i'm now looking at using simple nodes and tweaking display - i think that's what ostatic.com is doing (like contemplate to show only the titles and some field variable on one page, then 'answers' are really just comments on the published node) and so that may explain why 'unanswered questions' are always visible....

nancydru’s picture

nancydru
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commented

So what is this request down to now?

zilla’s picture

zilla commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

uh, nothing really - the notification of asker is already covered elsewhere, so shutting this one down ;)

ostatic’s picture

ostatic commented

Hi Zilla - I completely, absolutely and unequivocally support that assertion! As one of the people involved in the project from the beginning, I am happy to share anything that can be of value to the community. We do have plans of regularly disseminating this information via our blog. These past few weeks have been extremely hectic, and it has been like drinking out of a fire hose, but we do intend to regularly share the lessons we have learned and the things we did, for what those are worth...

We have a TON of new features that we will be releasing over the next several weeks, which would NOT have been possible without the great contributions from the Open Source Community at large - I think this is typical of several projects making their way to market these days. This list of upcoming features includes, but is not limited to, customized notifications/alerts, enhanced project-content linking, improved wikis, streamlined user profiles, project microformats, etc.

Yes, the site is built on Drupal's code base, and it has been heavily customized over time. We had to crack a few templates and frameworks to achieve our business logic goals and integrate other pieces of code we had already built. We wrote several modules ourselves, starting with existing baseline modules, and built our UI theme on top of the default B7 theme.

We built the faceted search engine outside of Drupal, mainly for performance reasons, and for the flexibility we needed to have. We will expose more of that technology as we begin to interlink related content to posts, showcase possible answers to user questions in-situ, and expose our third-party-content-integration.

Beginning with the site, our goal is to serve the Open Source community. There is a whole lot of amazing software and brilliant minds at work in the community, and our hope is to bring some of that work to light. We wish to make it easier for people to Find the right software for their needs, Evaluate against other open and proprietary source alternatives, and collaborate with others to share their expertise and experiences.

Any and all feedback is always welcome!

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

hah! now i feel like a total a-hole for suggesting that you guys weren't giving back - so seriously, please forgive me on that one...

i'm thrilled to see you on here talking about what's out of the box, what's custom and what may work its way back to the drupal community...

of course one thing i'd love to see is a theme contribution because the choices for drupal6 right now are very light!

ostatic’s picture

ostatic commented

Not at all! It is something we were meaning to do once we came up for air! We've been lucky to have had access to OSS, and we'd be delighted to share in any way we can!

Our plan is to ultimately re-modularize several things and share those back. We started out with our business model and IA and then worked our way into cherry picking modules, as well as functionality that we felt we needed, and, more often than not, that meant that we would write our own classes or modules, or customizing the heck out of some of the existing modules. We are, by no means, on the bleeding edge of Drupal's core, so the modules that we touched, we usually changed a lot of, and most of the others, we hardly nudged at all. Drupal has a great bunch of services and modules that work exactly as one would hope, so there was very little need to change any of that.

We actually did end up using our own notification system, which was still fairly light weight, notifier/subscriber architecture. That enabled us to easily have scenarios like the one mentioned above. We have some cool features that will be using the notification service (e.g. "notify me when an editor writes a story on a project", or "notify me when someone answers my question, or any other question I am following").

Hmm - what else... we wrote our own search technology and didn't use php for anything but the hooks. We wanted to facilitate filter-based searches to drill into results and took inspiration from engines like Endeca for that.

I would encourage you to come and 'kick the tires' at the site, let us know what we did well, and what we suck at. We have a lot of interesting thoughts, and would absolutely love to get your and the community's thoughts and feedback! If anything catches your fancy, let us know, and we can share our thoughts and learn from each other.

At the same time, do come in and help out the community by entering project reviews, beefing up the project database, listing alternatives, and guiding our bloggers with your thoughts and comments!

Cheers.

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

the whole faceted search approach is outstanding - probably the best navigation for this kind of massive information data store that i've seen in ages...great job! there is a faceted search module for drupal, built on the whole faceted search theory, so it's wonderful to see a real implementation (even if it's custom) - would love to know if you could roll it into a module some day...

as for notifications, there is a new d6 version rolling out which will probably solve the needs of my own site - i'm trying to build a very localized q&a community for a civic effort (town issues) built around an 'ask a question' model - my ideal scenario is to have it function just like ostatic's but with very, very different content (but let people follow questions, get notifications upon reply, navigate categories etc)

notifications for new content is killer - that's what gets people to come on back over and over...

and btw, the site itself is outstanding - the overviews of apps and related items is an incredibly useful site...

my only suggestion: instead of just a blog rolling into the front page, why not add a content type for features and consider, perhaps, a weekly detailed write-up (not daily) that covers one huge category - eg. "open source image editing" or "open source BI" or open source CRM and do a detailed giga-om style review of apps, alternatives, platform requirements, use cases, etc...THAT would allow you to link extensively to content throughout the site and let people really understand what the power of open source can mean (in general)

another feature request: screenshot galleries in the writeups of each app!!! perhaps broken out by admin/user where relevant...seems like a critical thing and other sites that cover open source try to do it, but not that well...also, since there are modules that allow for images to be assigned to taxonomy,this would allow for you to let users explore apps visually - eg. "let me browse screenshots of all the open source IM apps" and see what "feels good on my eyes" before digging into details - but show me only the MAC/PC/Web filtered items, and so on...

at any rate, keep up the great work! ...and my lingering question: are member questions simply a custom content type with a filtered view? (so that only titles show on certain pages, etc)?

nancydru’s picture

nancydru
she/her/hers
Primary language English
Location Boston
commented

Can you please open a forum topic for this discussion. A project's issue queue is not the place to hold a public discussion of unrelated topics.

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

okay. sorry.

kulfi’s picture

kulfi commented

From http://drupal.org/node/229955#comment-759640

Not at all! It is something we were meaning to do once we came up for air! We've been lucky to have had access to OSS, and we'd be delighted to share in any way we can!

Wondering whether you did get around to a project postmortem? I was just browsing around the projects section of ostatic and am so impressed with the way you present all that information (categories, tags, screenshots, search, etc). Would love to learn more about the overall process and techincal details.