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By mroberts@drupal.org on
Hi,
We are about to migrate an application called Dgroups www.dgroups.org (somewhat similar to Yahoo Groups) for collaboration among development orgs. to Open Source. Drupal appears to have lots of building blocks in order to create such a system, but I'm not totally sure if it can do the job. Does anyone know if any of this is possible:
1) We need to have some central site, where administrators (of groups) can create a new groups with an appropriate skin. Each group would contain a blog (news), links, calendar, document upload, and message archive (to a mailing list). There could be hundreds and if successful thousands of groups hosted by the one drupal install. An admin might be an admin of 1-200 groups or more.
2) Each group would have a unique URL so that members of the group could login to it.
3) The groups could be public or private.
4) Users of the whole system would be able to see all available groups and add themselves to appropriate public or private groups.
5) Users would be able to click a button called 'mygroups' to see the groups they would be belong to.
6) In addtion, there might be many other hosted iterations of the same thing all over the world. They need to talk to each other. Drupal's distributed authentication system might help solve this issue.
I noticed there is multisite patch (not yet integrated into the core I believe, although there have been some requests). This might solve the issue of creating the various groups, but I wonder if it is needed or if Drupals unpatched arch. could handle this model.
Lastly, I do know Civicspace (based on Drupal - and not forked) is doing similar and yet slightly different things, and we have talked with them about working together.
My big question is: what's your gut reaction.. Can Drupal do it? We've looked long and hard at various CMS and groupware solutions. None do this out of the box, and we would rather build upon something that we can mould to shape our needs. Drupal seems like a real possibility here and we like the fact that is written using php/mysql etc. Any help, suggestions would be most welcome.
Cheers,
Michael
mroberts@bellanet.org
Comments
Reply?
Did anyone ever reply to this?
About multisite
The multisite patch does not introduce multisite functionality, it just makes it easier to use. So you can do that even without the patch.
I think Drupal certainly do what is needed, with some modifications. Some features are already available in contrib.
Just what I need
wow, this is exactly the type of functionality I'm trying to setup. Also, the theme of my site is similar to dwgroups, it is a meeting place for non-profit and missions organizations, and users will be categorized by the organizations they are involved with and countries they work in, etc. I'd love to see some of this in drupal, but also need to keep the individual blog features.
*bumped for further discussio
*bumped for further discussion.
I just sat down to think about groups and drupal... read a few posts here about it.... and just thought that this thread should continue.
What are the latest thoughts and development on this important feature?
refer to...
looks like the focus should go here:
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/contributions/sandbox/jonbob/node_permissi...
http://drupal.org/node/11091
Groups Module?
Yeah, whatever happened to the groups module? It has been in that "not quite working" state for quite sometime. I think three modules should be looked at- groups, buddylist, and sections. These seem like they could be put together- oh and maybe with automember too, to make group sections of sites and allow people to invite friends. There should also be a "tell a freind" tool to invite friends into groups that way as well.
I think most sites would benenfit from more ways to grow their membership base through members inviting friends, and a group is a good thing to invite them to.