Do I want Organic groups? Am I mad?

Posted by samuk on October 12, 2009 at 4:09pm

Hi I am setting up a site that will provide local information to people in six cities.

The content for London will not be relevant to Bristol.

The obvious thing to do would be to set up six sites! I don't like to do things the easy way though :) so I thought I would see if I could do it with Organic groups.

There will be two types of content; events and organisations

This content will be catergorised into six or so sub catergories; (legal, voluntary, disability, educational, self help, violence).

Requirement 1; Users should be able to post their events. Events may repeat each week or month. Events should appear in the London Calendar without appearing in the Bristol calendar.

Requirement 2; Users should be able to post information about their organisation. It should appear in their local city pages only.

Requirement 3; I want to create a page for each sub category of information. Information from only one city should appear on this page.

Requirement 4; each city should have a navigation panel that navigates to other pages relevant to that city.

My initial approach has been

Set up a OG for each city.
Set up OG calendar.
install CCK and try to set up a form that has a tick box for each category.
install the event module
install Organic groups panels
I have installed the Organic group views module but it currently confuses me.

I have set up two content types; events and organisations.

I have set up taxonomy vocabulary for each of my subcategories.

I am struggling to pull it all together! Are these good modules to chose to do this? Anyone got any tips or hints?

Would it be easier to just create six websites?

Thanks

Sam

Comments

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Posted by WorldFallz on October 12, 2009 at 4:20pm

I think og is a great way to do this, but you could do it with taxonomy if you wanted as well.

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Thanks

Posted by samuk on October 13, 2009 at 9:23am

Thanks for your response - good to know the groups route is not that insane..

I am still struggling It feels like Drupal is a kitchenfull of ingredients and I am a chef with no recipe.

I would appreciate any 'recipes' for success.

Cheers

Sam

OG would certainly do this,

Posted by adam_b on October 13, 2009 at 11:05am

OG would certainly do this, but probably isn't necessary unless you want to restrict access and postings to specific groups (eg if the London users shouldn't see or post into the Bristol group). It takes some time to get to grips with the details of how to use OG (speaking from experience here), so you might find it easier to work without it at this stage.

As long as the users can be expected to select the appropriate city, it would be very easy to use taxonomy to set up your scenario - and you definitely don't need six websites :)

I'd make taxonomies for the content category (as you've done) and for the cities. Users would then choose the category and city when posting. The Views module can then be used to present content which is selected according to the category/city. If you want to make the layout more detailed, then the Panels module is a reasonable add-on.

Thanks for the reply Adam

Posted by samuk on October 13, 2009 at 11:33am

I will have a good think about whether just using taxonomy and views is the way to go for me.

Just three questions;

1) One of the requirements is a events section, I would need a separate calendar view for each city. How would I go about doing this without using OG calendar? Can it be done using event views?

2) If I wanted certain users to be able to moderate content for their city could I restrict them to just having edit rights on content with a 'Bristol' taxonomy? Or would I really need groups for that?

3) If I later decided that I did need groups can you imagine a upgrade path? How would I retrospectively associate all content with taxonomy 'Bristol' with the new 'Bristol' OG?

Thanks

Sam

You can either make an

Posted by adam_b on October 13, 2009 at 3:58pm

1. Yes - you could make an individual view for each city, or make one view and use arguments to restrict the content.

2. You could do this with other modules such as Taxonomy Access Control - but moderation is actually the sort of thing that Organic Groups is designed to manage, so if you think this will be one of your requirements then perhaps OG would be the right choice for you.

3. There's no upgrade path as such. You could probably use something like Views Bulk Operations to select and change multiple nodes at one time, but (depending on the volume of content) it wouldn't be a five-minute job.

Same here...

Posted by nemchenk on October 28, 2009 at 5:27pm

I've got a very similar requirement -- a site with many mini-sites, each one with its own content and users. I've heard many, many people say that Taxonomy is the way to do it, but I like the way OG would fit in here.

I'd love to hear more about how your project is going, samuk.

I'm trying to get my head around OG and navigation -- I want to have just one nav block, which shows only links for the corresponding OG (rather than one block for each OG!) but don't know how best to approach that. adam_b, you seem to know what you are talking about with OG. Could we tap your brain a little? :)

My knowledge of OG is derived

Posted by adam_b on October 29, 2009 at 9:31am

My knowledge of OG is derived from trying it out - I'm no expert. Feel free to ask questions, but really the only way to know is to use it.

Thanks, adam_b. I'm trying to

Posted by nemchenk on November 3, 2009 at 3:34pm

Thanks, adam_b. I'm trying to use it *now* :)

I'm looking at OG Menu, but it seems like it would imply setting up a separate menu for each Group? Would that be the way you would recommend doing it?

Afraid I've never used - or

Posted by adam_b on November 5, 2009 at 2:11am

Afraid I've never used - or even looked at - OG Menu, so I can't help with that one. Anyone else have any comments?

OG Menu has been rewritten

Posted by jide on December 25, 2009 at 4:39pm

See http://drupal.org/project/og_menu

Success!

Posted by nemchenk on November 11, 2009 at 11:13am

Ok, I've had some success getting a similar sort of thing going. Here's a brief summary of what I did:
- installed and set up OG, obviously
- I then used Menu Block to set up a block using the Primary Links menu cut off at the 2nd level (levels 2+) and
- I set up a new sub-theme of ninesixty. I could have used OG's way of assigning each group a separate theme here, but I didn't want to set up blocks for every OG if things changed in the future.
- Instead, I hacked my theme's page.tpl.php and added a short bit of code which worked out the name of the OG, and injected a request for a CSS file of the same name. In that CSS file, I override the colours of the main theme for each group.
- I used OG User Role's ability to assign logos to each group to further customise the group micro-sites
- I used DHTML Menu to make the menus nice and scrolly -- this bit is completely optional :)

That's it -- I now have a quick and easy way of setting up new OG micro-sites which have slightly different skins courtesy of CSS files, all in one theme.

I'll keep you posted on how my build goes...