I have installed WAMP and Drupal on my local machine and have been playing around with it for a good 5 days now. I work for a school district and am trying out different CMS Portals to see if there's one that would fit with us. After looking into SharePoint (which many other districts seem to use), I find it overly complicated for our users and too bloated for our needs (not to mention ridiculously proprietary and expensive).
Seems that all the CMS Web Sites out there are mostly crap for Document Management and most of the Doc Management stuff is horrid for CMS Web Sites (SharePoint included). I can't seem to find a good, easy solution that my delegated laymen users won't punch me in the face for forcing them to learn.
So far, I find Drupal quite odd with it's terminologies and approaches to adding content but have somewhat grasped it enough to try to put up a test site. For putting up websites (for offices like the different schools, departments, etc), Drupal seems pretty decent. We've been using Macromedia Contribute with our existing site to give users (who are completely clueless when it comes to web design) access to WYSIWYG editing and to lock them out of editing anything but what we want them to. Drupal seems pretty good for us in this area.
Except for documents!! Being a public org, PDFs are abound. I need file management and a SUPER easy way to upload and give access to those files to visitors to the site. I need those docs to be managed only by an admin and the user(s) who are in charge of managing that part of the web site. The only solution I have come up with so far is creating tons and tons of separate sites for each department and school (which is out of the question seeing we have so many!). That, or creating group users so that people in a certain area all log in with the same username to administer that part of the site and then log in as themselves when they are through to get to their files! Bleh.
Searched the forums and mods.... I've tried playing with WebFM. Seems this is only one single file area that I can manage. Tried IMCE using FCKEditor. That's only for individual users. Doesn't seem you can share docs between people in charge of the same area of the site or have a group doc folder you can assign members to.
What I really want is doc management along the lines of SharePoint (public and private docs, group shared docs, etc) mixed with the web site CMS that Drupal already has.
Haven't found any good mods/solutions. I'm still a complete freakin' noob when it comes to Drupal so it's quite possible I'm overlooking something but searching the forums, people seem to have some of these thoughts as well. Can someone point me in the right direction or tell me it can't be done?
Comments
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Have you investigated the organic groups module aka og.module ?
You can also use the upload module
It is part of the Drupal core so you just have to enable it. The Upload module allows users to upload and attach files to content. You can simply create the user roles you need and assign users to those roles, then from the access permissions page you can allow those roles to use the upload module. You can download and install the awesome Views module to do all the fancy display of those attached files.
Drupal is really perfect for this sort of thing.
Hope that helps,
Tim
Looks promising
Well, I did look on my first day at organic groups but kind of steered away from it on the advice of a guide for noobies saying it's a bit advanced. Looking into OGs, I did stumble upon an awesome screencast from Drupal Dojo on groups.drupal about Panels, OGs, and Panels_Views. That looks like almost EXACTLY what I'm looking for (though some project management features would be cool too)!
The main concern is that this feature requires a 3rd party mod (Panels 2.0) which is still in beta...... not the best thing for something that I need to be the core function of my site! OGs, Panels, Views, CCK, and File Management looks to be a configuration nightmare. That's all good so long as it works and it's easy for my users to navigate and operate.
The Upload feature I just didn't understand. It's not very intuitive and I just didn't see any way to share docs or make them private to just the logged in user. Drupal has such a huge learning curve. It really doesn't go about things in the normal way most applications do and I'm forced to slow down and read a lot (not something I as a Net Admin have much time to do LOL!!!)
I'm hoping by sticking to it, I'll get rewarded. If I can get a stable, easy to use, and reliable site that is similar to what Drupal Dojo was showing in their screencast, I'll be happy.
Guess it's back to more reading and searching. If you could provide any links to some guides that are good for setting up OGs, Panels, Panels_Views, etc, I'd appreciate it. I'm still confused after trying to get a friggin' calendar to work what with making me create custom content and views... ugh. You'd think there'd be a simple calendar module that isn't shared by the whole site without having to make a new content type for every separate calendar you want on your site.
Anyway, thanks for the replies. Yet another reason I'm hoping Drupal will be something I can use... the community seems great.
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Panels 2.0 is in Beta - Panels 1.2 is not
http://drupal.org/project/panels
As far as the calendar goes, welcome to the flexibility and power of Drupal. If you wanted a simple calendar that doesn't really do much, you could have used the google calendar pasted into a block.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the 1.2 version does not include the Panels_Views module. That is only available in 1.2. Granted, I still don't fully understand the panels mod but the panels_views mod seems it would be a huge part in making panels easy for my end users to grasp and operate.
As for google calendar, well, I assume you're talking about the Google Calendar API module that allows you to synch your Google calendar to Drupal's events? If so, that would require everyone to make have separate accounts just to use a simple calendar? I'm sure I'm missing something with Drupal's events/calendar feature so I'll read up more. It must be easier to configure multiple calendars than it seems from the tutorials I have gone through.
I'm mainly a Networking/LDAP/Active Directory/.NET guy and the last web site I worked with was PHPNuke 2 years ago lol... so I'm still behind the curve : /
I've got OGs set up now and I think I'm starting to grasp the basic concept of how it is implemented. I think this might work quite well for me if I use Views and Panels as well. Crossing my fingers that Panels 2.0 goes out of beta before I start to configure a real site :)
Panels2 RC
Organic Groups is definitely the way you want to go. And while in the beginning it might be a bit harder to grasp than Microsoft's stuff, for the tricky details you'll get invaluable community support. And if you need some functionality that is not yet there, chances are good that you'll find someone who adds that functionality for you.
Panels2, while still in the beta phase, will see its first Release Candidate soon (~ 2-3 weeks). Anyway it is already used by organizations and companies for major websites. Sure, it's not yet perfect, but getting better every single day. And if you post a bug, it's gonna be fixed quite fast. I'd already recommend Panels2 for production sites, given that there are some three or four weeks of time before release.
Btw, I also have some specific PDF needs (including PDF generation) that I'll need to figure out until August. So maybe I can help you on that stuff. With panels stuff I can also help you as a co-maintainer.
Hope you didn't settly for something else - you're right here!
DOCman
I have a feeling that you have already found a working solution, but for whatever it's worth DOCman component for Joomla CMS is the best - easy to use and various configuration options for security are built in.
I am looking for document solution for Drupal, and have not found one yet.
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failry easily built using a content type and the additions of file fields. lists created with the views.module
Though admittedly I don't know the exact feature set of DOCman.
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I used it back in my joomla days (shudder)-- i can't think of anything obvious that docman does that couldn't be done with cck, views, taxonomy_image, etc.
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