Hey,

I'm looking to see if theres a way for group admins to have some type of logical promotion of posts in their groups. If a group has 500 posts, how can they determine which ones to bring to the front page/subpage, etc, or which posts should display before other posts. If you make different views to show different group posts, there isn't a really good way for group admins to promote/feature posts within their group, as far as I know.

Featuring can be done by making a CCK text field (say...featured yes/no), and restricting access to that field through OG user roles (make another user role that has access to that field through CCK field permissions module), but that only works if and only if that post is assigned to one group only. If the post, say "Jane's favorite cookies recepie" is assigned to "John's cooking group" and "Bill's cooking group," if the group admin in "John's" group featured the post through the CCK text field (and the view for both John and Bill's group sorts by that field being set to "featured: yes"), then that post will be featured in BOTH John and Bill's group, even though only John wanted to feature the post and Bill doesent want that post featured.

So while it might work in certain instances in the short run, that methodology for featuring is inept and will eventually fail.

With this in mind, does any module currently exist which would allow for per-group specific featuring of posts, which could be put into views for sitewide use? Example: Imagine the scenario above, where John could have featured a post in his group, and it would be featured in, AND ONLY IN, John's group. If the post was in John AND Bill's group, it would be featured in John's group, but not Bills - although Bill could feature that post as well if he wished, although it would be independent of any other featuring in another group.

This would seem to me to be an ideal way for Group admins to promote content within their own groups.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I have contacted a developer to see what it would create to make something like this happen and the pricetag was considerably steeper than I would have anticipated. I wouldn't mind partially sponsoring the development of this module, but hopefully I am wondering if something like this exists beforehand!

Thanks in advance.

Comments

moshe weitzman’s picture

moshe weitzman CreditAttribution: moshe weitzman commented

og_subqueue is our best framework for this IMO. another option would be to extend flag module to work on a per group basis in addition to its current per-user.

rc2020’s picture

rc2020 CreditAttribution: rc2020 commented

Interesting,

I don't know much about og_subqueue, in fact I haven't heard about it, but I think this would be a great feature to add. How can I help?

moshe weitzman’s picture

moshe weitzman CreditAttribution: moshe weitzman commented

Well, you can experiment about what it takes to build what you want and then blog about it and post here. I have not tried. The plumbing is sort of there, but we need docuemnt the glue thats needed, and polish things.

marcp’s picture

marcp CreditAttribution: marcp commented

I think Moshe may be talking about Smartqueues for Organic Groups.

rc2020’s picture

rc2020 CreditAttribution: rc2020 commented

I'll check out smart/nodeque momentarily, but here is what I was proposing assuming smartque is inadequate for a good featuring schema.

I figure the most practical way of making this happen from a UI perspective would be to clone the "group audience" block in each node add form, but instead of those checkboxes adding that post to a group, have each checkbox "feature" the post in the group in question (or provide a mechanism to filter posts in views by this featuring schema). The only groups that would appear in the checkboxes would be groups the current user is a manager of, or has permissions to utilize the featuring module. If it's a new post, the user/admin must assign it to a group, and once it is saved, edit it again in order to feature it in the groups the post is assigned to.

Checkboxes is solid from a UI perspective, it would mimic the already existing groups audience, which users are already accustomed to, and I would think the code for the audience could be copied with some modifications to allow for it to feature posts in groups. I'm not a coder so I don't know how to handle this myself. But, I would like to start a discussion and get some input about the featuring. I think its a really solid idea and gives a ton of benefit to the community, and is a motivator for larger organizations to come onto a drupal platform because it gives them the ability to feature posts specific to their organizational needs.

What do people think would be the best use of a featuring schema? Should it be a simple "featured" "non-featured" (done with checkboxes, on and off), or would it be better to anticipate the needs of certain sites that require multi-tiered featuring? Say, featured on the front page of a group, a subpage of a group, perhaps by having some type of weight (0-10) to determine how "featured" it is compared to other posts.

IMO, I feel that a featuring schema and prebuilt group configrations (which is exactly what OG Blueprints would provide if it worked) are the two biggest things OG is lacking to really create a critical mass to start a revolution of sorts in social communities. It helps bridge the divide between us techies and standard users who have trouble finding the more complex UI's of drupal modules unusable.

What would it take to make this a reality?

What do you guys think?