Posted by chrissearle on September 5, 2006 at 5:47am
Well, as an active leader in the Longship group (www.longship.org) I got the suggestion for the group from David, an ex-longshipper who is now an active leader with 4th Caterham (http://www.4thcaterham.org.uk/).
Longship is running drupal, Caterham is looking at switching.
It seems that drupal is a good match for such youth group sites - so - here's a group to allow discussion on what works well, what not so well - a place to ask questions and to exchange ideas.
I have a feeling that drupal is also well suited to large events - think for example about JOTI, or a site during and after a jamboree.
So - any scouters/guiders out there who are using drupal or who think they might benefit - come along and join us :)
Yours in Scouting
Comments
Using the Book Module
I've recently joined a BSA Troop with my 2 older sons. As a computer geek, I was asked to oversee the existing Web site. And guess what?! I'm going to convert it to Drupal! :^)
My primary motivation in doing so is to utilize the book module to create a few public resource guides for new Scouts, parents and leaders. My biggest frustration is that not only do I not know anything about Scouting (having never been involved with Scouting before in my life), but I don't know what questions to ask to get the information I need. I hope to help reduce the potential frustration level for future Scouts and parents.
The other modules that I see as being of importance are the forum module, the various event modules and the various image modules. I may use CCK instead of the event modules, depending on how much work it is. I will actually just be putting the site into place and be mostly letting the boys handle the content (except for those resource guides, of course).
duplicate post removed
Active contribution
I think that having a site where the members themselves can be responsible for the content is a prime mover for me. Older versions of the site only I could update - and tended to be very static.
I'm hoping for a much more dynamic and involving site with the new drupal version - which means
1) less for me to do
2) the scouts themselves feel that the site is relevant to them.
I'm already getting hints from the parents that the new site is more interesting (which I find interesting because the content is the same) - so the next step is to get the membership themselves involved.
Organic Groups
I'm planning a new hungarian scout portal, which will use drupal. I think the organic group module, combined with events module will be useful for us. At first, I will create a home page for my troop, and if it works well, then maybe the website of the Hungarian Scout Association will use the same architecture.
19th Maidenhead
David contacted me about the new group so I thought I'd let you guys know I set up the 19th Maidenhead site with a handful of custom modules. The biggest part I made was the fact that all events etc are stored online - linked to who went (to be seen by leaders only). There's quite a lot of information about the members available through the website and we do try to keep it up to date.
I'd write a longer comment - but I'm literally just about to leave to look after the above Scouts!
Another duplicate
Preview comment seems to be saving the comment the same as post comment. Odd
Now I did like that. I've
Now I did like that. I've been wondering whether or not to go over to a section-based view (cubs/scouts/explorers) - and you seem to have got that working for you.
How much customisation did you have to do?
Scouting Drupal Targets
Thanks to Chris for the credit - it's now officially all my fault!
I've got several Scout sites in mind for Drupal conversion. They're at different levels - there's a single section Hospital Group, which has a rough & ready drupal trial running at http://17thdev.17thholborn.org.uk , a multi-section Group (similar to Chris) and also a Scout District site which I now have responsibility for dragging out of the dark ages!
The District site is one that I have recently taken on and is in urgent need of attention. I'm going to try and focus my attention on this one as it has the biggest potential. There are 11 groups in Caterham, each with several sections, all of which could use the site to report. This makes for possibly 50+ contributers and hundreds of potential readers. The intention is (in time) to replace the current electronic District Newsletter, so that users submit reports/events to the website and the newsletter in effect turns into a RSS feed.
David
Yet Another Scouter
Interesting group.
Our units have had a site that the scouts put together way, way back in the 90s, which is now running on a legacy box with legacy software and slowly dying... (see http://www.troop8.org)
After quite a bit of looking at options, the scouts who are working on the website issue opted to go with Drupal and are actively working the learning curve. As am I! Learning curve is quite steep, but they're committed to running the old and new sites in parallel sometime in January. Initial target is to have the background & events stuff up, along with the basic people information and perhaps some of the "back end" advancement tracking. They'd like to build the people information into a more complete social networking type site.
Anyway, good to have a few fellow scouters sorting through the drupal bit!
BG
Great web site
Bob
I see your post is nearly 12 months old, but I hope you are still arouns and you are able to help.
I had a look at the Troop 8 web site and am very impressed by the theme and content. If possible, I'd like to understand what modules were used, and whether the "Vulture" theme is available.
I've been "volunteered" to build a web site for our local scouting District in rural Australia. Our organisational structures are different from yours, so I'll give you some background. The District covers an area around 90 miles x 70 miles and includes 12 scouting Groups located in small towns. Each Group consists of between 20 and 50 children in cubs, scouts, and venturer sections. Each scouting section (cubs, scouts, venturers) also has a District-wide structure for program and leadership development, adult leader mentoring, and knowledge transfer.
I need to build an "umbrella" web site for the District, that also has a "child" site for each Group, also scouting sections within each Group and across the District. Initially the OG modules seemed to fit the bill, but after experimenting I saw that they would be too complicated for some of our less computer-experienced people to administer. So then I started experimenting with Views, and I think using Views with Taxonomy will provide enough flexibility while remaining simple for users.
Are you still involved with the web site? Are you able to provide any insights or ideas (what's working well, not so well, what you would do differently)?
Thanks
Steve
Hi Steve, The website you are
Hi Steve,
The website you are looking at now is a "work in progress" that is being done in large part by some of our youth members. As with all youth work, it has its ups and downs. We've found the initial learning/usability curve for drupal to be a bit high for modern kids (there aren't as many youth programmers as there were in my day, LOL), but they've been working through it. One of the big challenges for us has been the different roles and access restrictions between roles and such, especially the youth/parent thing.
I will say that we went through the same bit you did in terms of looking at OG and then deciding not to go that way. Scout groups really aren't "organic" in their structure. We're a bit more formalized, which does make things simpler. Views with CCK relationships has been our primary approach rather than with Taxonomy; for some reason the youth members don't dig the Taxonomy bit. Fine with me since I'm a bit more of a traditional DB guy.
Overall: Don't get too complicated too fast. Our guys have spent a lot of time on fine-grained tweaks and stuff. If you've got youth working on it, make them separate subdomain "sandboxes" with independent drupal installations to play around in. We do that, and then pull things together on a development site before sending it "live." There's a big upgrade coming soon.
I can go over structure and modules with you directly, or we can keep it going here in the hopes other scouters will take note. I also just last week ran into a teacher who is doing something similar with Drupal for a secondary school site; that community might be a good one to look to for ideas as well.
Bob
Thanks - gave me some ideas
Bob
Thanks for your reply - very useful.
Also exchanged a couple of emails with David from Caterham (above).
I decided to go for a single Panels Page, with five views driven by Node Type and Taxonomy. That way I can set up the whole structure with the Panels Page, menus, taxonomy, and views (with the Panels Page passing arguments to the views). I'm also experimenting with Themekey to use a different theme for each Scout Group (the Group name is a taxonomy term and is therefore part of the URL that drives the Panels Page).
As I mentioned earlier, when it is finished the site will host ten Scout Groups, each with four sections, plus the four district-wide sections (Joeys, Cubs, Scouts, Venturers). The content will be maintained by the leaders of the respective Groups and Sections.
So far the site is working ok apart from needing some refinement around "sticky" posts - the stickiness doesn't seem to survive the taxonomy-driven filtering and sorting process. Unless I can find some way around it, this will impose some restrictions.
As it stands, the site is still an experiment, lacking refinements such as calendar/events, images, and other stuff that should be easy to add once I get the structure working properly.
After that it'll be a deployment job, and this is where your advice around keeping it simple will be very useful. The temptation is to launch with all the bells and whistles, but given that many of the leaders - up to 150km away from here - are not sophisticated computer users I will launch with just a couple of simple node types and few options, then activate the other stuff gradually.
Thanks again for your help - I'll look forward to seeing your site upgrade.
Steve
Scout District with Multiple Groups
I've finished the site I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It's a single URL that includes taxonomy-driven "mini-sites" for ten Scout groups plus District-wide sections.
I had a few objectives that guided my design choices:
- easy to maintain (therefore no code changes and minimal theme changes)
- a theme per Group, Section-in-a-Group, or District-wide-Section (themekey)
- easy for Scout Leaders to add content and members (I had to use Path Access to block certain nodes that would otherwise be exposed to Leaders who like to "explore")
- expandable and as future-proof as possible (so after reading through some Drupal forums I chose panels, taxonomy and views on the basis that they seems to be the overall direction for D7 and beyond)
- easy to add photos and simple galleries (so I chose Gallery Assist and Image Browser, cognisant of the limitations of not having a node per image)
- compact page layout that's flexible across many themes (chose Panels, Tabs, and Taxonomy Views used drop-down menus where possible, and Nice Menus elsewhere)
(Organic Groups appeared very attractive at first but OG Panels isn't ready for D6, and I found I was reaching the limits of the OG design)
Added a couple of eye-candies - Cumulus tag cloud and a Shoutbox.
The challenge now will be getting the respective Group Leaders to start using the site/s. They seem moderately enthusiastic but the proof will be in the usage.
It's at Tilba Tilba Scout District
If you are attempting to build a similar multi-Group Scout District site and want more information around my design choices, barriers and trade-offs, reply to this post.
Steve