I have been investigating OG to figure out if it is a viable approach for the a-thon site. I have built much of the site without OG and I am pretty comfortable with both function and ease of use. Having said that there are a few functions that I still haven’t figured out how to do, and they happen to be things that OG appears to handle well.
The problem is that while OG appears to be very flexible, the documentation is almost nonexistent, making it really hard for me to get my head around what it can and cannot do.
I set up a test OG site to play/learn. It is really quite cool but the UI is staggeringly complex. Furthermore, I see what I think are some show stoppers for my application, but lacking expertise on the module, I can also see how easy it would be to miss or misunderstand how OG could be implemented.
Specifically it looks like it would be hard to overcome two fundamental issues; there may be others, but I have not gotten that far in my investigation.
I need the users to be able to set up and operate an a-thon with zero requirement for direct support… in simple terms, the UI has to be idiot-proof. OG appears to be able to do the user setup part, but OG is anything but simple or intuitive. Having to deal with even the basic OG options will stymie most users. That will lead to support requests, abandonment, or failure to use; all bad things.
I hope to have thousands of a-thons operating simultaneously at some point and it seems pretty clear from some of the posts, that OG is not really designed for that kind of volume (numbers of groups). Its sweet-spot appears to be relative few groups with large numbers of users.
In my mind, OG is more of a “development” than a “user” environment. It would take a herculean effort to rethinking and rebuild the UI such that it could accommodate thousands of smaller short-term groups (a-thons) setup and ran by complete non-techies.
So while OG has some really nice capabilities, UI complexity and possibly scalability could be problems.
I would appreciate your (or anyone who has some experience with OG) thoughts.
Regarding your second item, this website runs using OG as it's primary controlling interface, so I suspect that it can handle a large number of groups.
It's been a couple of years since I've looked at it, and I'm not real familiar with the current UI, so I can't address ease of use. However, OG is designed to be a sub-site for users and administrators, so it's probably going to mimic an actual website in that regard. Maybe there are additional modules that might make it easier.
Comments
I don't use it directly (I
I don't use it directly (I use it as part of an installation profile w/ Open Atrium). What questions do you have about it?
Twitter
-Michael
Og functionality
I have been investigating OG to figure out if it is a viable approach for the a-thon site. I have built much of the site without OG and I am pretty comfortable with both function and ease of use. Having said that there are a few functions that I still haven’t figured out how to do, and they happen to be things that OG appears to handle well.
The problem is that while OG appears to be very flexible, the documentation is almost nonexistent, making it really hard for me to get my head around what it can and cannot do.
I set up a test OG site to play/learn. It is really quite cool but the UI is staggeringly complex. Furthermore, I see what I think are some show stoppers for my application, but lacking expertise on the module, I can also see how easy it would be to miss or misunderstand how OG could be implemented.
Specifically it looks like it would be hard to overcome two fundamental issues; there may be others, but I have not gotten that far in my investigation.
I need the users to be able to set up and operate an a-thon with zero requirement for direct support… in simple terms, the UI has to be idiot-proof. OG appears to be able to do the user setup part, but OG is anything but simple or intuitive. Having to deal with even the basic OG options will stymie most users. That will lead to support requests, abandonment, or failure to use; all bad things.
I hope to have thousands of a-thons operating simultaneously at some point and it seems pretty clear from some of the posts, that OG is not really designed for that kind of volume (numbers of groups). Its sweet-spot appears to be relative few groups with large numbers of users.
In my mind, OG is more of a “development” than a “user” environment. It would take a herculean effort to rethinking and rebuild the UI such that it could accommodate thousands of smaller short-term groups (a-thons) setup and ran by complete non-techies.
So while OG has some really nice capabilities, UI complexity and possibly scalability could be problems.
I would appreciate your (or anyone who has some experience with OG) thoughts.
tim
You're familiar with groups.drupal.org, right?
Regarding your second item, this website runs using OG as it's primary controlling interface, so I suspect that it can handle a large number of groups.
It's been a couple of years since I've looked at it, and I'm not real familiar with the current UI, so I can't address ease of use. However, OG is designed to be a sub-site for users and administrators, so it's probably going to mimic an actual website in that regard. Maybe there are additional modules that might make it easier.