Modules recommendations/sanity check for edu. group site
Hi,
I am building a Drupal 6 website for my amateur radio emergency service club. One of our key missions is training (educating) others, so I am trying to build a useful online resource for our members, and others who visit our site. I have built several stand alone drupal sites, before but am now branching out into group sites. In this case we have several groups linked by location (e.g. a specific city) or interest. I need advice in planning a few key features.
1) A way to provide each group with a group area (including a group events list/calendar, discussions, album). I think that OG is the standard way to do this. My ideas is something similar to g.d.o .
2) If the group type is location based, I would like to have the events node form prepopulated with location (location module) of the group. This way it cuts down on how much the user has to type. They should be able to change it in case the event is not in the groups main location. For this, I was looking at the prepopulate module. My guess is I would have to initially build a OG group type which has location data associated with it. Then I would have to write php which queries for that location data and adds it to custom node add links for events. Maybe I could even write a custom token which stores the location data. What would be the best way to go about creating these links and getting the data?
3) I would also like to offer each group it's own menu. I would prefer there to be a standard set of menu items to begin with but that could be changed by the group admin. This could either be a standard Drupal menu or 'tabs' like on the main page for this drupal-in-edu group. What is the easiest way to do this in OG (or whatever group solution you recommend)?
Has anyone found any good tutorials for OG? This is one area I keep have trouble figuring out all the details behind.
Thanks in advance everyone!!!
my 2 cents
1) OG sounds like a good place to start. That's what I use, and as you say, it seems to be the standard answer.
2) If you are going to create a unique content type for each of your groups, this one is pretty easy. Make a custom field and enter a default value. That way, people can leave it alone most of the time, and just change it as necessary. If you are trying to get a single content type to work across different groups, then I think you'd have to have radio buttons folks could click to indicate the group they are in, and some conditional php in your template (contemplates module) or node.tpl.php file. At least, that's the approach I would try.
3) All I can think of is to use php conditionals to control the display of the blocks containing your group menus. There is probably a much slicker way to do this. Hopefully someone else has something more interesting to offer.
I have a book: Drupal for Education and E-Learning, that explains a fair amount about OG, so I haven't really gone looking for tutorials. I believe the author is the owner of this group, so if you ask some specific questions, you will probably get good answers!