By Chin Yee on

We are creating a site for a food cooperative. We'd like a public discussion area that anybody can view (and post to if they register and log in) and in addition a number of private areas for working groups covering things like 'finance', 'policies' and 'publicity' that only groups members can view.

So it seems like we need a combination of organic groups and forums, but it's tricky to set them up so that users find them intuitive and don't have to remember to tick particular boxes when creating topics. Searching through the Drupal forums I have found comments saying this combination has it's problems, but haven't found a good alternative for us.

Our requirements don't sound that unusual to me, so is there anybody out there who's done something similar?

What I've tried so far...
I created an organic group for each working group. This is good for managing membership of the groups and distributes the admin tasks to the group owners. So far so good.

With this I tried multiple forums (one public, and one for each working group), but although I thought of a working group and its forum as being linked, in Drupal they weren't. When users posted a new forum topic they had (i) a drop-down menu of forums to post the topic to, and the drop down menu does not always default to the right thing AND (ii) had to check the audience boxes were set up correctly as well. This is more complicated than it needed to be.

So I went back to a single forum and now the group pages separate out and list the forum topics belonging to that group which is good. However, with this set-up the forum page lists all the topics from all the groups a member belongs to together with all public topics, which is not so good as it's not easy to see which topic belongs to which group. So we created a view and hacked the views code to list all non-group forum topics, but now we've lost all the nice features that come with forums such as telling you what's new, because we're using the views module not the forums module to view the topics.

Og_forums seemed to be about automatically creating a forum for each group, which is useful, but brings back the drop-down menu issue.

It feels like I'm probably thinking about OG and forums the wrong way somehow. Any suggestions?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

mhutch’s picture

mhutch commented

I recently reimplemented forums as a layer on top of OG. Essentially there's a'forum post' node type, and it behaves like any other node type when viewed through 'create content' or 'og'. However, the forums section displays these nodes in the traditional forum layout, as if each group is a forum, displaying just the forum nodes for that group. At the top of each forum is a posting link that creates a new post for that group, using http://example.com/node/add/content_forum_post?edit[og_groups][]=nid style URLs. This effectively fills out the dropdown list, but still allows cross-group posts if the user desires. You can see it in action at http://johnsjcr.org.uk/groupforum.

It's not really polished enough to be posted on drupal.org, but if you'd like to use it please contact me. I'd like to take this module further, e.g. actually implement a 'forum' node type instead of using CCK, so that it can link back to the forum rather than just appearing in the group, but I really don't have the time right now. I'd be willing to hand over development to someone who'd be able to take it to a releasable state.

Christefano-oldaccount’s picture

Christefano-oldaccount commented

I'd love to try your groupforum module. After trying the patch at http://drupal.org/node/68295 I'm sure your implementation is the way to go.

I've sent you a message via your contact form.