How do I implement a multi-department site?
turtle182 - August 13, 2005 - 18:42
Hi all,
I'm building a site for a Town using Drupal. They are looking to have a section of the site for each Town department, where the department head would be able to manage their section and their section only. So my questions are:
1. How do I essentially give each department its own section of the site complete with its own categories and possibly template, too?
2. How do I implement user management granular enough to set up users to manage a section of the site and no others?
3. If a section has an administrator and several writers, how do I make it so they can edit each others' content?
Any help and/or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Organic Groups
Would be a good place to start.
There is also a sections module in CVS that allows you to theme different areas of the site in different ways, but I haven't played with it to see how it works, or how it might work with OG module.
Cheers,
bonobo
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
I saw Organic Groups and
I saw Organic Groups and thought it might be something along the lines of what I might need, but it almost seems as though it's a members-only type thing. I guess I'll just have to install it and play around to see if I can have the content viewable by anonymous users. That would be great if it did and may be the solution I need.
Thanks again!
You can do this
After you have installed and enabled OG, go to the admin page for it at admin/settings/og
You will see two areas -- "Visibility of posts" and "Audience Required" -- these two settings will determine who can post where, and who can see it.
Cheers,
bonobo
-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
Organic groups seems great, but...
After working on a county government site, I came to the conclusion that organic groups was not for me. My problems with it were due to its lack of compatibility with taxonomy_access. I had already bought into using taxonomy_access and taxonomy to organize content and establish permissions on my site. For editing content, if you don't use taxonomy access and you have a large vocabularly to classify content, then your department heads are going to have to scroll through your entire list of vocab terms to get to the classification for their content (not user friendly in my case-- to the point that I really needed taxonomy access).
Therefore, I used taxonomy access, nodeperm_role and the (experimental) node_access module to set up a set of permissions for my site by user roles (one for each department). I'm not sure I need that node_access module, but it doesn't seem to cause problems yet-- and maybe you could get organic groups working with some other permission modules.
You can see a better overview of my work to this point by viewing this thread: http://drupal.org/node/27661
There's also a link to the site, if you would like to check it out (I'd welcome any comments-- it's still in development, so I'm looking to improve things!) Mostly, I got the hierarchy established using taxonomy context and the book module.
Good luck. I'd be glad to share more of my experience in trying to create this government site, if you have any questions, etc.