Drupal for sailing club
I'm evaluating Drupal for possible use for a sailing club website. The club already has a website that is static HTML.
Some requirements:
- Member directory -- need to have a directory of the members (accessible only to authenticated users) including member's address, phone number(s), etc.
- Calendars -- need to have multiple calendars (e.g., social, racing, etc.)
- Ability to assign members to groups -- need to be able to assign members to groups for the purpose of sending out targeted notifications (e.g., send an email notice to all members that are boat owners excluding those that are not boat owners)
- Media gallery -- ability to host photo and video galleries
- Integrated forum
- Ability to tie email notification to a calendar entry -- club members are assigned to help with running races and it would be killer to be able to send them an email reminder of their upcoming duty
Most of this shouldn't be a problem from what I've seen of Drupal. My main concern is with the "member directory" as I haven't seen anything that would appropriate fields to the "user node" (if I'm using Drupal terminology correctly). Ideally, I would want some way to be able to add fields to store user address, name of spouse, name of children and phone number (home, work, cell). Integration with Google Maps to display the address on a map would be awesome.
If anyone knows of a club that has successfully used Drupal I would be interested in getting the site URL and contact info to correspond with their webmaster.
Thanks!
-Bruce
Member Directory via Views
Check out Views again. You can create a view based off of users, not just nodes.
It's easy to create a member list that shows various profile fields (or cck fields if you go the usernode route).
Also, If things like CCK GMap Address aren't compatible with Drupal 6 you can always theme google map links from addresses manually. There are a plethora of ways you can create a site like this (I have done it).
I would encourage you to stick with Drupal 6.
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>>Member directory
The core profile module has the ability to add very basic fields for storing additional user information. As the other poster mentions, with views (in d6 only though) you can create various listings of users. For more advanced profiles, you'll want to look at the http://drupal.org/project/content_profile and http://drupal.org/project/advanced_profile modules.
>>Calendar
http://drupal.org/project/date and http://drupal.org/project/calendar modules or the http://drupal.org/project/event module. These days I prefer the date/calendar route.
>>Ability to assign members to groups
There's a couple of ways to do this. You can use the http://drupal.org/project/og module (for an idea of how it works, see groups.drupal.org), or with roles (built into core).
>>Media gallery
Currently I recommend the http://drupal.org/project/swftools and http://drupal.org/project/flashnode modules for audio and video. For images you'll want to look at the http://drupal.org/project/image and http://drupal.org/project/imagefield modules. Also take a look at the http://drupal.org/project/lightbox2 module. There's also a plethora of gallery type modules.
>>Integrated forum
Core forum module. You'll also want to look at the http://drupal.org/project/advanced_forum module which enhances the core forum in many ways.
>>Ability to tie email notification to a calendar entry
I don't believe the calendar modules have this ability, but you should be able to set it up with the http://drupal.org/project/rules module.
Welcome aboard and good luck!
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"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." - Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz
Groups or "groups"
I'm not sure if you're interpreting his use of "groups" correctly. I ran by it the first time myself and thought "og" as instinct, but then I continued to read the line. Here however notice that he just wants to separate users for mailing purposes. This is great, rsvp and all ;-), but he may not need the overhead of og.
So I'm hesitant to advise og. It may be necessary for some other uses later on though.
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True enough-- and that's why I recommended looking at groups.drupal.org, but I guess all the words in my head didn't make it out to my keyboard. ;-)
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"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." - Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz
I've found the Profile
I've found the Profile module and have played with it some. It seems to be able to do what I want.
Regarding the calendar (I've played with the calendar and event modules only slightly), I'd like to be able to have multiple calendars that users can select which to display. This would be equivalent to most desktop calendaring programs. For example, I'd like both a social and racing calendar and allow users to display one or both on the same calendar. Looks like this can be done with OG Calendar.
I've been playing with OG as I thought it would be relevant for a number of reasons. Now I'm not so sure. Some issues I'm having:
1) for each of the organic groups I want to have a "home page" (which is possible) but then I'd like to list the "manager" (in OG terminology) and their contact info on that same page (i.e., I want to do something similar to this page (see the bottom where the "Highlander Fleet Contact" is listed). Is this possible?
2) I want to link user's "organic group" membership with the user directory. In other words, in the "account" info I want to list all the OG that the user is a member of. Is this possible?
3) I'm using the Pixture Reloaded theme and with OG enabled, group posts to the group page all appear in bold. This is inconsistent with the rest of the text in the Pixture Reloaded theme. I suspect this is a bug in Pixture Reloaded and a simple tweak of the CSS but I haven't had the time to take a look yet.
For the media gallery I'm planning on just using the Fast Gallery module and Lightbox2. I don't really need anything horribly fancy. Flash is not allowed on any of my websites :-p so SWF Tools and Flash Node are non-starters.
Thanks for the heads-up on the Rules module. Hopefully, that will address the notification of upcoming calendar entries (will need to be able to tie the notification to a user, though; I suppose this is something like a meeting entry on a calendar for which you'd like a reminder; will keep searching...). It's also become apparent that I'll need to generate notifications for updates to user profiles so the membership people can update information in their system also (I plan on having the Drupal user profile info be the master copy and let users modify their own data, thus the need to generate the email notifications).
One thing I'd like to be able to do and haven't seen how to do is to store something like a phone number as "1234567890" and then have what I call an "output mask" generate the output of "123-456-7890" or "(123) 456-7890" or whatever format one would like. This separates the actual data stored in the field from the output format allowing you to change the output format without touching the data itself. This is usually a built-in feature of databases, but I'm not familiar with MySQL...
So far, I'm pretty impressed with Drupal. It seems very flexible and well-thought out...
Thanks for the help!
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#1) might be doable with a block view, if not should be easy enough to code into a custom block.
#2) built-in-- i'm just not sure if its an option.
#3) don't see a question there
phone: http://drupal.org/project/phone (not sure if it has formatting, but probably worth looking at).
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"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." - Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz
"Multiple" Calendars
These are pretty easy. You tag each event with its category and then create new calendar Views with the categories you want displayed.
Slightly more sophisticated would be to have separate event types (we do that).
If you want more info, contact me through my link above.
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"He's said to be outspoken, but nobody's actually seen anyone do it"
Three Sailing Clubs
pacific cup: http://www.pacificcup.org
Corinthian yacht club http://www.cyc.org
Passport Owners Association http://passportyachts.org
All three are built on Drupal and have calendars.
Pacific Cup uses advanced forum module
Gallery2 Integration also works, but I am reinstalling now following a hardware failure.
Date and Calendar integrate nicely for events.
I use Webforms with some validation for events signup.
I have previously had a google maps display of everyone's location. It was compute-intensive and I deleted it from the old server. I may reinstall it.
NodeProfile and CCK allow virtually infinite customization for directories.
This can easily work for you
OH and I forgot! Ubercart allows you to do fully-integrated commerce!
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"He's said to be outspoken, but nobody's actually seen anyone do it"
Thanks for the reply...
Cayenne, thanks for the reply and links to the sailing club sites using Drupal. I've been able to answer quite a few of my initial questions after playing around with Drupal and some of the contributed modules. Most of what I want to accomplish has been pretty straightforward...
I'll probably be using OG to handle the different fleets at the club. A couple of fleets have created their own websites outside of the official club website and I want to bring them back. Using OG will allow them to have their own "stream" of news and being able to do some things on their own. OG also enables group-based calendaring which addresses my need for multiple calendars.
I don't really want to fool with integrating a separate gallery with Drupal. Too many headaches with compatibility down the road I think. I'm either going to go with Fast Gallery (quick and dirty, but not very flexible and doesn't really seem very "drupalish") or Galleria (much nicer integration with underlying Drupal structure). Right now I'm leaning towards Galleria.
I would be interested in how you implemented the link to a Google map of member's homes. To be clear, I'm not interested in having a map with all members locations on it (something that can be accomplished with a contributed module whose name I don't recall at the moment). What I'm thinking of would be something where you would specify the Profile fields for the address, city, state and zip code and it would then automatically include a link to a Google map for the user's location when someone viewed the user's profile information. The utility for this would be an easy way for member's to get directions to another member's home quickly and easily. As far as I know, nothing like this is currently available.
The Event module has what I need for scheduling events and sending notifications.
The only other thing I would like to have is a contact method that uses user accounts instead of specific email addresses. Each fleet in the club has it's own contact and I don't relish the thought of setting up the usual Drupal contact form with email addresses and then having to update them when the corresponding fleet contact updates their account information. Seems like there should be an option to have a contact form where you specify a user account for the contact instead of an email address...
At this point, I'm not rushing to implement Ubercart. The club has some merchandise available but I doubt the person that handles this would be too keen on using a web-based solution. Also, I suspect we would not do online payment processing (I haven't looked too closely at Ubercart but I suspect that it can be used to generate orders only without doing online payment processing). This might be a project for the future though...
Are there any other Drupal folks interested in sailing that hang around here??? I've seen a handful of sailing clubs sites that are built with Drupal and it might be handy to have a group over on groups.drupal.org. Something that I would be highly interested in would be importing of regatta results into Drupal but I doubt I have the time (or expertise) to pursue it...
Location
A real simple way to do this is to override user-profile.tpl.php, and then add in a link to maps.google.com with the address fields as parameters in the url. However that is pretty hackish.
The location module will work wonders for you probably. You can setup user locations for user profiles with links to maps. And you probably could setup a CCK locations for news items and blog posts so people can check out where the regatta was.
Location, Location, Location
My most recent foray into the location field was a test that used the location module and gpsmap. Worked exactly as you said.
Give it a try.
OG for fleets is a perfect idea. That works just fine.
How about this: Each fleet owner is the owner of the node that is the Group.
Create a View of nodes of that type. In your view, table listing, include the username of the owner as a link, as well as the node title. That might work as sort of a quick and dirty contact form.
Or you may have to do it manually. Oh wait!!! Create a contact type "Fleet COntact" with CCK. Tell your users that they have to fill it our if they want to self-identify as a fleet contact. Include the appropriate fields and create a view... VOILA!
As to pictures, I will look at what you suggest. Gallery2 is a challenge, but is SO richly featured...
I dropped the Event module in favor of Dates and Calendar. I use webform for signing up for events. I had to figure out some validation code. I don't have a "reminder" tool, but I am only dealing with 90 reservations at a time, so that's not too bad.
Yeah, you can have Ubercart with a "COD" or whatever option.
Hmm. Perhaps we should form a Sailing Drupal Users Group. Oh wait. you said that. Interestingly, the import of regatta results is my next to-do item. My club has been using software I wrote about 5 years ago to score regattas, so I have control over the output format. I have been trying to figure out how to grapple with the upload issue.
Maybe a group is a good idea. I have submitted one. I hope that we get approved.
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"He's said to be outspoken, but nobody's actually seen anyone do it"
My plan with OG for fleets
My plan with OG for fleets was to use the fleet captain as admin/owner of the group and hence be able to edit the group "home page". However, I didn't like the way the formatting of the group "home page" for the theme I'm using (Pixture Reloaded). At this point, I think I'll have a separate static fleet page that will be accessible by anonymous users (solves the problem of how to show the group "home page" to anonymous users since I have a page per fleet on the website giving an overview of the fleet and contact information).
I'll try your suggestion with CCK and a contact type of "Fleet Contact". Not sure really what you're driving at, but I'll experiment around and see what I can come up with...
One big plus for our club is to have a calendar with reminders since members do PRO and safety boat duties. The club officers and racing chairman are *very* excited about the ability to have a reminder email automatically sent to the PRO and safety boat persons a few days before their duty. I don't think I can take that feature away at this point and still show my face at the club ;-)
Nice to know regarding Ubercart not requiring the payment module. Online store will be a "second generation" feature I think.
I'm very interested in having regatta results online so let me know your plans and if I can help with whatever you try to tackle with that. I'm a database developer in my real job by have to admit that I'm not very familiar with SQL databases (I use a delimited multi-valued database called Advanced Revelation/Open Insight [revelation.com] in my work) or PHP. Willing to help and learn, though.
As part of the regatta results, I'm thinking that having a "boat" database will be essential. The idea is to have a database of boats with information on the boat type and sail number and whatever additional info seems relevant. The boat could then be linked to the appropriate Drupal user in the user profile as the "boat owner". For regattas, this would allow scoring a boat that was raced by someone other than the owner (i.e., the results would specify the skipper as a link to the user profile and the boat as a link to the "boat" database). Hopefully, that makes sense. I have no idea how to implement this, though.
Nice to know you submitted a request for a "sailing" group. Hopefully it will get approved!
We are approved!
groups.drupal.org/sailing
Go and join!
The regatta software I am using is written in Java and stores the data in a comma delimited database. I accidentally re-invented the relational database, I think.
WHat I'd like to be able to do is upload a page of results and get them parsed out to the boats in the website database for display and summary later!
More discussion at the site
groups.drupal.org/sailing
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"He's said to be outspoken, but nobody's actually seen anyone do it"
Location module help...
Cayenne,
I've got the Location module installed and (I think) working. My main problem is that once I've input a location in the user profile nothing shows when I view the profile except the textual information. How do I get a link to a Google map? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the features of the Location module...
The map view of all defined users works just fine so I think I've got the basic configuration setup correctly.
Any help is appreciated as the Location module documentation is pretty sparse.
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To get gmaps integration you need to add the http://drupal.org/project/gmap module (which integrates nicely with both location and views).
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I have the GMap and Gmap
I have the GMap and Gmap Location modules installed.
I'm seeing some odd behavior (e.g., I setup the Location module to allow 3 locations for the User profile; when editing a profile, the first location shows up normally but the second and third locations are missing fields; also, the Location settings for the User profile appear *below* the "Save"/"Delete" buttons when editing the User Settings). Perhaps the Location module doesn't work with D6.9?
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No-- it works with d6.9, but i have found it a little buggy. I just noticed there's a brand new rc release available-- perhaps try that. if you still have bugs, check the module's issue queue and file a new issue if there isn't one already.
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Don't be a Help Vampire - read and abide the forum guidelines.
If you find my assistance useful, please pay it forward to your fellow drupalers.
I've got 6.x-3.1-rc1
I've got 6.x-3.1-rc1 installed. I'm running quite a few other modules; perhaps something is conflicting. Sigh, guess I'll need to disable stuff to see if it starts working and/or do a clean Drupal install and start fresh.