Drupal for a School Boards Association? Need to set access levels.
I've been given the task of re-doing a state school board association website entirely. Right now it's on Typo3, which has proven too difficult of a learning curve for those involved, and it's too difficult to make it "pretty." For a slew of other reasons, I'm trying to sell the switch to Drupal.
I'm 90% sure I want Drupal. Especially over Joomla because of SEO and the ability to control what different viewers can access.
I have different types of viewers:
*The average School Board Member
*Members who have paid to have access to Policy information
*Committee Members who have to have access to their committee information
I have to protect the Policy information and Committee information from the average School Board Member. I can't allow the Policy info to be seen by the Committee members and vice versa. Basically I need to set viewing permissions.
In addition, I don't currently need to have any features that allow people to contribute. There will be no posting/blogging/commenting by anyone other than the site administrators. I may need these features long down the road, but certainly not now.
I think I need an additional module to do this?? Some sort of access management module... I've seen several names mentioned like ie_simple, content_access, tac_lite, node_privacy.
Does anyone have any experience with one of these? Is any one more simple, or is any one overkill for what I need? Anyone's experience is helpful. Thanks!
Role system
I think Drupal's core access management using roles should be sufficient for your needs. Please see http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/user for more information.
For more fine grained access control you could use on of the many contributed modules: http://drupalmodules.com/m?title=access&c=User+access+and+authentication...
My personal favourite is the Taxonomy Access module (TAC): http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_access
hth
Frank
Exactly, you should be fine
Exactly, you should be fine with the role control access given by the core of drupal.
As for Frank's favourite access module Taxonomy Access, I would say it is a great module indeed, as long as you install it before creating any vocabulary, this is, you need to plan your taxonomy needs carefuly with this module in mind. Taxonomu Access will deny content access to everyboy once installed, so you will need to configure your vocabulary access aftewards. If you create plenty of vocabularies with plenty of terms and then install this module you'll be very busy, so plan before if you intend to use it. In any case, I don't think you will need it in your project.
Robert Garrigós
Professional site: garrigos.cat
Wow - Quick Reply!
Thanks to both of you for the quick replies. I'm new here (obviously) and in online research heard that the Drupal Community is very helpful. Nice to know that's true!