By mlbowden on

Good Morning...

I have recently installed Drupal 6.4. And I really like it! But I need some advice. I want to use Drupal for a consortial web site that I manage. Currently the consortium's web site has information about each institution only. But in Drupal, I want to be able to have two types of accounts: institutional and personal. The institutional account would contain information about each institution in the consortium (e.g. address, telephone numbers, web addresses, etc.). While the personal accounts would be available to the staff of each institution and contain information about mailing lists, special interest groups, committees, etc as well as his/her institution. (Ultimately, I would like to be able to get a unified staff list for each institution and the consortium.

Is this something that I can do with Drupal? If so, can you offer advice on the best way to do it?

Thanks.

Michael L. Bowden
mlbowden@hacc.edu
Harrisburg Area Community College

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

dman’s picture

dman commented

Start with Organic Groups that's the current Drupal project(s) that handle most of what you describe. http://groups.drupal.org/ is just one manifestation.

Alternatively (I can't quite tell is your focus is for the individuals or about them) there are 'profile' module enhancements that supply affiliation details much like you see on drupal.org user accounts.

.dan.
if you are asking a question you think should be documented, please provide a link to the handbook where you think the answer should be found.
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.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

I think the Organic Groups module is a good fit here (http://drupal.org/project/og). These are subscriber groups, each one has its members, its administrators, can maintain private and public content, and has a main page to keep its information. The http://groups.drupal.org site is running on OG.

So, "personal accounts" can be Drupal users and "institutions accounts" can be groups, which is natural. An institution doesn't log-in, it is just an organized collection of information. An authorized user logs-in to an institution, can get promoted or fired.

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

Make two roles and give each user one of the roles. That much is core. There's lots of contrib modules that will let you do things based on role from there.

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

keppingm’s picture

keppingm commented

I am a newbie to Drupal, started in December '08.

I believe I have a similar requirement to Michael's "Hierarchical User Accounts" plus an added level of complexity to the picture that I have not found a solution for. I have downloaded the OG module and configured my site for my initial test group. My site has anonymous user access to publically viewable pages. On the "Home" page is a "Member" link for user to sign on. I have two dozen accounts with 5 different Roles (admin, board members, manager, employees, interns). With core Roles and the OG module, this is working AOK for my initial test group. Now I want to add another test group and one special user in the board members. I want the new test group to have their own home page once they log in with their own manager and seperate forums and blog that the initial test group. Eventually their will be 20 of these groups. I would like to implement the Facebook "Invite" concept to allow one group's manager to be able to "Invite" another group as read or read/write members to one of its OG groups.

I have looked at the Multiple-site module as a solution. But since I don't have control of APACHE or shell access, this doesn't look promising. My Web host service uses cPanel as the base website setup.

I was a Unix System developer for large (20K+ users) Enterprise server for over a decade. We used UNIX file system groups and ACLs to accomplish similar tasks. Not sure if one can do the same with Windows file system permissions. The file manager in cPanel does not have access to ACLs, even though the base Unix OS supports ACLs.

I have two non-profit organization, a potential commercial application, and a personel web site that can use various forms of these group features. All are planned to be Drupal base at this time.

I am running Drupal 6.10 using the OG module, CCK module, and VIEWS module.

--Mark

dman’s picture

dman commented

Now I want to add another test group and one special user in the board members. I want the new test group to have their own home page once they log in with their own manager and seperate forums and blog that the initial test group. Eventually their will be 20 of these groups. I would like to implement the Facebook "Invite" concept to allow one group's manager to be able to "Invite" another group as read or read/write members to one of its OG groups.

Sounds like normal OG so far to me.
Which bit are you stuck on?

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

keppingm’s picture

keppingm commented

I created taxonomies for two different OG's, one called Corvallis and the other called Newport. I created a new account and want to assign the person to the Newport OG. When the mark user logs in, the only group that is visible is the Corvallis OG. This account can see all of the Corvallis OG.

Hopefully I will have time to try things on Sunday.

--Mark

keppingm’s picture

keppingm commented

Hierarchical groups are still not working as I would like. And, nothing has changed since creating the new account and trying different settings on the OG groups or taxonomy.

I have both the O'Reilly "Using Drupal" and Apress "Pro Drupal Development" books and the "Drupal Essentials" CD from Lynda. None of them address the issues. Each seem to dance around the capabilities I am trying to accomplish.

On a Unix system, I would be using the users default group to map them to their default URL and their default OG. Then use either a user and group ACL to give them access to other OG groups. How do I do this with Drupal core modules and the OG module?

I have been involved as a tester with alpha and beta versions of software for Unix systems. All have been BSD or OSF based Unix's. I have extensive C++ and PERL associative array programming. I'm interesting in PHP and MySQL, but have little experience. Is Drupal Version 7 an option to address these issues?

With my commercial Drupal project, I will be very interested in the e-Commerce module that has recent updates along with hierarchical groups.

--Mark

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

I think some of the difficulties here are that:

(a) OG module does not rely on user roles or taxonomy but on its own subscriber system, it has its own access control, and it is primarily intended to be used alone or together with some og-specific extension modules. See:
http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/90

(b) Combining different access control modules in Drupal is really difficult, in the sense that you need to go against Drupal's default access control behavior and its "OR" logic. See for example:
http://drupal.org/node/196922
http://groups.drupal.org/node/5392

(c) It is not clearly understood what you want to achieve. It is possible that OG with some of its extension modules can help, or maybe the OG approach will prove too rigid and you may need to assemble something with roles, a role delegation module, and a more abstract access control module (such as content_access with acl or taxonomy_access) and with the views module.