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By kieran-1 on
I don't know if this is in the right section or not, but I just wanted to know peoples thoughts. I've spent the good part of 2 weeks now messing around with almost every aspect of Drupal in the vain attempt to acheive the following.
I require a family portal effectively, somewhere where an entire extended family can communicate online by posting little (and maybe large) news articles, organising events and creating/viewing photo albums of all these events, stories and other things that go on in their lives. I wanted a site that looked really good (Drupal does), is easy to use for the end user and does everything I want it too and maybe more that I haven't thought of yet.
When I found Drupal i was overjoyed, it showed so much potential to do what I wanted, I was really excited about it! But now I cannot contain my frustration!
I installed it, got it working and started to look around the settings and functions etc. I wanted to use the organic groups module to be able to create a little mini home page for each family unit within the extended family, and then I wanted it to be possible for an article/album/story/poll to be posted to that group and viewable either just to that group, or to everyone, or to perhaps several groups but not everyone on the site. I also wanted to be able to post it to like a category (which is what the taxonomy module does I think) so that someone could browse the site by category... for example, if someone wanted to see how all their grandchildren are doing in unveristy they could click on a "category" menu item and be presented with a list of categories to choose from, one of which could be "University".
I'm going to stop writing what I wanted the site to do now because this post is turning into something resembling War and Peace, but you get the picture? I wanted a site that did all this, and the Drupal site and the actual system itself made it look so acheivable and so simple, and yet... I'm going nuts trying to do it. I can see it's possible, but whenever I try it, it just doens't work!
When I post a story to one family organic group, I click that groups name in the menu and I get a message to say there are no posts in that group, even though when you view the story the link at the top says it's in that group! I post comments and they don't appear, photo album software (either Acidfree, or the more simple version) don't want to display lists of albums, or post at all, I mean... nothing works how it's meant too! Maybe I've done something wrong, or maybe I'm just stupid.
Please, has anyone else had as much trouble as I have getting things working? It would be nice to know I'm not alone in wanting to just give up and remove it!
(End rant here, lol)
Comments
Can be hard
I hear your pain! Sometimes it doesn't go as easily as you'd want, that's for sure. I don't have the answer right off for your specific problem... but I'm leaving a comment here so that I can track the post better because I want to make sure someone comes up with a solution and you get the site that you're looking for.
- Robert Douglass
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My sites: HornRoller.com, RobsHouse.net
Sounds like you are having permission issues
Everything you've written is pretty much how I would set things up, but it might just be overkill. If you are going to have it viewable to all family members, you might just use categories for everything. Have one vocabulary for the Family, and one called Categories for the topic.
Organic Groups has permissions that restrict views, and there is a a central setting for choosing whether postings should be viewable just in the group, or throughout the whole site. The permissions can be quite tricky.
Acidfree is a brand-new module, and I know the developer is working hard on. The image module is quite reliable, and might be an easier choice (image, not album....album is, I believe, being removed from organic groups, so you're likely right in thinking that it doesn't work).
for album ...
you could try g2 instead. It integrates and works very well with drupal 4.6.x The brief instructions are here http://gallery.menalto.com/page/welcome_to_the_new_gallery_website#comme...
good luck
I would recommend
setting up a version of the site without any access control. Also, in your initial set up, turn off some/most of the content types to simplify things as you sort out the functionality. Start with a pretty vanilla install: enable forums, pages, blogs, and images. Experiment with access rights for the authenticated user, then add another role with different permissions, and experiment from there. Set up one vocabulary for one content type. Set up some forums. Expand the site slowly as you sort out how the different pieces work.
It can get confusing with different content types posting into different terms. Book pages are a very useful content type, but they can add to the confusion when you are setting up a site initially because any node type (and a node in any taxonomy term) can be added into a book outline. So, as you are doing the initial set up, don't deal with books.
Then, setting up any access control will complicate things further. When you are getting your head around the functionality, having another level of functionality that requires precise configurations can add an unnecessary level of complication.
Drupal will do what you need it to do. Stick with it. Party of the learning curve (part of the fun?) involves getting REALLY frustrated, and then figuring it out. At the end, you will have a site that your family will love to visit.
Also, if you want to take a look at a pre-configured site with taxonomy access control installed and configured, I set one up on my web site for dowload. It comes with some basic, general documentation that helps explain how/why it was configured. While it was designed for educators, it can be useful for learning Drupal.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
bonobo
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Oraganic Groups module does
Oraganic Groups module does some permanent things to your database and really should be avoided for something as simple as what you are doing. It's not an entry level new to Drupal toss it in module. It's a fairly advanced usage module.
Acidfree is a realativily new module and is reported not to work with Organic Groups in the issue tracker.
Album is being deprciated in 4.7 so I would suggest sticking with image module.
-sp
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
start simple
Drupal is very simple framework and fools you because because that simple framework hides a complexity that requires a bit of time. You know what you want so you are better off then a lot of people that start blindly.
So, go for starting simple.
Profile, Taxonomy, forum, comments, page and blog.
Build your categories so that people can select multiple to post in. Blog so people can post and edit their own posts. Page for the 'static' mini home pages. Turn on aggregator for newsfeeds of interest to the family.
As to permissions. You have three approaches. Node based, taxonomy (categories) by role based or Organic Groups. Pick one. I advise against Organic Groups becuase I think it may be overkill for what you want. Others will have different opinions of course :). Note: I don't use it though have occassionally troubleshot installs of it. If you use node based permissions, you can grant permission to restrict per page to a given group (maybe assign roles by family group) what people can and can't see. If you do the taxonomy by role, then you can restrict entire categories giving up the flexibility of node based permissions.
It's not that you're stupid, it's not that nothing works, it's just that it's new and there is an intial learning curve that the simple, quick install lulls you into a false sense of security. What you are learning now are the relationships between the various core and contributed modules and how to assemble them.
-sp
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Some good advice in these comments
Specifically:
Organic Groups does some great things, but it can be confusing for a user who belongs to more than one group in a site. Also, the configuration options can be daunting.
For what you are describing, either taxonomy access control or node privacy by role modules sound like your best bet -- IMO (and I would be VERY surprised if anybody had any different opinions :) taxonomy access control would be the best choice down the road -- using TAC, you can set up a site that will be more intuitive for the non-tech savvy end user.
However, before you drop in TAC, play around with a site that has no access restrictions in order to sort out the way that taxonomy intersects with content types. In short, get your site structure/organization clear before you start limiting access to that structure.
My .02
Cheers,
bonobo
-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
From my experimentation, and
From my experimentation, and I admit that I'm probably the cause of the all the acidfree does not work with organic groups posts, organic groups is sometimes quirky. For example, in the version I used, and you might have downloaded, you must have the comment module activated for it work properly. If you do not have it enabled, what will happen is this: You will attempt to post something to the group, but it will never show up in the group homepage. It was accessable through the admin "content" menu, but not through the group. I had to delete all the posts I had posts before I enabled comments, and repost them with comments enabled. I think they even need to be read/write capable, but I'm not completely sure about that.
As for Acidfree & Ogranic groups combo, most of the issues I had were with OG and not Acidfree. I think my main issues got resolved, but I ended up switching to gallery2 (partially because of the issues) before I got to test them and see if it worked.
On a side note, I never tried Taxonomy access module. If I want to use that module, but already have OG installed, will there be issues?
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www.liberalthinkers.org - a community for liberal viewpoints.
Thank you!
Thank you for all the advice you've given, it's really good and helpful. What I'm going to do is to delete all the stuff I've got, remove the databases etc and start from scratch. I think now the whole install has gone haywire and I have no clue whats doing what or what has permission where so a nice clean slate is in order.
It's encouraging to know it gets easier, I mean I'm familiar with PHP and have used all sorts of other things, and would not consider myself a non-tech-savvy person, but this Drupal really threw me! heh.
Thanks for your help, I'm going to keep you posted on what I acheive.
I think it would be a great idea if someone wrote like a beginners guide to Drupal or something, the online documentation is sometimes a bit hard to understand.
Thank you again, keep the advice coming, it's excellent! You've given me hope! haha.
LOL. Regaurding the
LOL. Regaurding the beginner's guide, this is a topic of much, much discussion (from my standpoint). I've personally started several topics on it:
http://drupal.org/node/32977
http://drupal.org/node/33465
http://drupal.org/node/37238
I think a beginner's guide is very important. I also think the documentation, as it stands, is not helpful for beginners. I'm not sure exactly how to improve it, but I think we need more verbose people writing the documentation pages.
I'm sure a forum cop will come in here in a little while and tell us all to shape up and contribute...
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www.liberalthinkers.org - a community for liberal viewpoints.
reduced expectations
I've done a few Drupal sites now. What I have learned from the community sites I've done is that non-technical users are not likely to register or post content. Keep it simple. Don't bother setting up a lot of catagories; you're doing great if you get 10% of your audience to post anything at all. If you end up with a lot of content six months from now, you can worry about sorting it out with catagories when you move it off of the front page.
You might consider other solutions. My sister set up a family web page on groups.mac.com today - simple, straightforward, well integrated with OS X, includes calendar, notes, photo albums, links, privacy. I was impressed. I'm not sure if they offer that in UK.
I recommend the blog module and the shout box module, plus the taxonomy stuff that is included in the core. Be forewarned that Drupal does not handle images well. I gave up trying to get the image modules to work and added gallery2 instead (another free php script). You might have better luck with the image module if you install it before anything else; I traced the problem to the way the module registered with the application, but I was never able to resolve it.
Reload too
I'm in a similar place as you, though I'm having a bit more luck. One problem I hit several times was that my browser wasn't reloading. I found a couple times that a Shift-reload solved the problem of non-appearing comments and posts.