I'm in the middle of launching my community website with the "community" aspect of it being driven by organic groups. Out of the box, drupal comes with a couple of types of content - pages and stories. Then you might add forums and blog (it seems to be a best practice to have a site development blog) and you have 4 different content types that could be used in organic groups.
How does one decide what type of content to allow?
I've reasoned that when users join groups and post content, it takes one of 2 forms - an announcement or a topic for discussion. An announcement might be something like, "Hey, we're all going to play touch football at Jones Beach at 4pm tomorrow. Be there or be square," where as a discussion topic is more along the lines of "what do we all thing about xyz." Now, do you think that "announcements" should be a different content type than "discussions?" With announcements, you sort of want them to be visible (think group homepage) and comments may not matter too much, whereas with discussions, it's all about people responding.
I think it's nice to have discussions and announcements separated so that there is less sorting through in order to find what you're looking for. I also think that the "story" node type is extremely confusing to the average person.
Comments
Makes sense to me
One of my biggest concerns with the groups functionality is that it's not obvious to the average, non-tech user that groups are a great way to communicate with other members. I like the idea of "announcements" and "discussions" rather than blog posts or pages or what-have-you because it's very clear what they're used for.
However, I'm concerned that
However, I'm concerned that even 2 types of member content could be too much. It makes sense to me, but the question is whether it will make sense to people who are new to online communities or people like my mom who are new to computers.
Yahoo groups calls their content type "messages", which is pretty intuitive, but it seems like what it really is, is an e-mail chain that gets posted to the groups page.
I'd be curious as to if it's possible to display the different content types differently. Discussions would probably be best as rivers of news whereas announcements are probably best in table form.
You can display content types differently
Just check the $node->type variable and adjust your layout accordingly.
I'd personally like to see tighter linkage between groups and email. For example, I'd like to just be able to reply to an email instead of having to click through. I'd be willing to pay a bounty for someone to devlop this.
already exists!
There is a bounty for this!
Reverse Bounty: og2list - mailing list support for Organic Groups
I don't know what the status is, but it seems like it's pretty close.
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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
OG2List is in production with a customer
OG2List basically provides yahoo-groups functionality in Drupal based on organic groups. All the code is in cvs
Just check the $node->type
Is there an example of how to do this? I'm a beginner when it comes to php coding.
If you're new to PHP
You might want to start here: http://drupal.org/node/46012
And also take a look at the article linked below it called "Customising blog nodes layout." It uses the example of creating a template called node-blog.tpl.php. The "blog" part of that name corresponds to the $node->type variable, which defines what kind of node is being rendered (blog, story, image, event etc.)
So in your use case of two types (message and announcement), you wuld create a template called node-message.tpl.php and one called node-announcement.tpl.php
This customizes how an
This customizes how an individual node gets laid out, but what about a list of nodes? OG allows you to chose either tables or river of news on the homepage, but what if you want to do both? Doesn't that require an override?
Normally, as I have seen and
Normally, as I have seen and experienced it, announcements are displayed as rivers of news and discussions are in table form. Taking the Drupal types that are available in core, stories and pages would be more like announcement types and forums would be a discussion type. Blog types could also be considered either an announcement type or a discussion type, depending on how it was configured and used.