By Hudson Public Schools on
I am setting up a website built on Drupal for my entire school district. I would like to figure out how to set it up so that there is the one main site (http://www.hudson.k12.ma.us), and that will be the main district page. Then from there you can choose a different smaller site for each of the schools (high school, middle school, etc...). And then along with that, I would like each teacher at the main schools to be able to create their own personal pages, which they can update and edit themselves to post up homework, important dates, and news. I'm not sure how this would be possible, but any help would be greatly appreciated.
Comments
yes you can....
First of all nice job you are doing. Ok so to do that... first you have to create a specific role for Teacher say Teacher and a specific content type for their personal page. You also need to use views (i love them) so that when they login they only see their personal page and hence can edit it. So in summary you have to set permission for Teacher role what they are suppose to do.
Chetan
Thanks for the quick reply on
Thanks for the quick reply on that one! I have gone through and made the role of Teacher and also created a new content type called "teacher page". However I'm a little lost about using these "views". I have gone through and edited the permissions for the teacher role, and set it so that they can create and edit their own teacher pages, but I'm not sure if that's what you meant by set permissions on them.
And also, do you know of a way to list every teacher page in an unordered list or something? So you could go to www.mydrupalsite.com/teachers/ and it would show a list with links to every teacher page created.
What you are asking is a
What you are asking is a little more than can be explained in one thread. You will need a combination of the CCK module and the Views module. There is a book called 'Drupal Multimedia' you should check out. It goes into how to use these two modules to create custom pages.
edit: just re-read your last post. Actually, if you've already created the content type, then you are halfway there, so maybe you can do it. First, add a field to your 'Teacher' content type, and call it 'school'. Download and install the views module. The views module lets you select items out of all the uploaded items, and group them. So you want to find all the teachers who are in school X. Create a view for School X, and get all the teachers who are part of school X and display them. This is what the 'views' module does.
Contact me to contract me for D7 -> D10/11 migrations.
You could go the route of
You could go the route of trying to make ONE drupal site into eight distinct 'sections'. You'd most easily do this by making a content type for each school, taxonomy for each school, and user roles for each school. However, Drupal isn't 'section orientated' by its nature, and you'd probably struggle trying to manage it all like this. As suggested, you'd have to make extensive use of the Views2 module to build customised 'lists' of content for each individual school, and be very clever with your use of 'content access' modules. The menu system might be a little inadequate for this too. As for each teacher having their own 'personal page', the easiest solution would be the core blog module, but again it would be hard to separate all the blogs out so you could browse them 'by school'.
I've got to build a site for two school annexes, a summer school, and saturday school and an alumni site to build (five separate 'sections' in total), and I'm definitely going to do it with separate sites using Drupal's multi-site capability (ie. one install running separate sites). This means each site will only share the installed modules; each will have a separate database, theme, admin set-up, taxonomy, content-types, module configuration, etc. It will be like administering five almost completely separate sites. This creates a lot more admin and maintenance work, but offers far more flexibility and individuality for each of the school 'sections'. It is not as mind boggling or confusing as sharing everything yet trying to keep everything separate - I tried that first, but got stuck very early on and had to change my plan.
Note that if you build a 'main site' for the district, you can use the drupal core 'aggregation' module to automatically pull in posts from certain feeds of the individual school sites, so you have a central place to get news from all schools.
Either way, you've got your work cut out! Give yourself a great deal of time for this project. You're probably much more competent than me, but I've spent 400+ hours in 6 months on our school site, and I'm only half way there. Learning Drupal while you build such a big project will slow you down a huge amount, and there are many things about Drupal that aren't even suitable for school sites. For instance, you cannot sign up for an account without supplying a unique email address, which is useless for students, especially young ones. Also adding media is too difficult for children or teachers who have no experience with computers.
Also, I notice your current site is multilingual. Note that Drupal handles multi-languages BADLY.
Adding languages to your sites is a large under-taking with many pitfalls.
Really? I've found Drupal to
Really? I've found Drupal to be quite good for multilingualism. It takes a bit of understanding to get it working, but once you do, it works well.
Contact me to contract me for D7 -> D10/11 migrations.
> It takes a bit of
> It takes a bit of understanding to get it working, but once you do, it works well
I found that >50% of the language features don't work as they are supposed to, especially when you start installing modules. I had to re-design the site around its inadequacies, and even now leave most of the site untranslated. Plus it's so convoluted to do anything, so it increases development workload a lot. The core content translation works ok, with a few caveats. But I'd personally forget trying to use menu, block, taxonomy and content-type translations - they are too buggy. I'm not saying to the OP to not try it. What I'm saying is, it will probably add many frustrating weeks onto his development time.