I'd like to use Drupal for a division wide site for schools and teachers (we have a corporate site, not Drupal based, but it is awkward for individual teachers to create their own web presence on it).
I currently have a Drupal 6 site running, using LDAP authentication, but am still low on the learning curve. More or less what I'd like is for there to be a small group of overall site administrators, with each school having its own web presence. Each school would have its own site administrator, who could grant permission to teachers in that school. Each teacher would administer their own web site, and have control over it etc. It has to be possible to control access to each part of the site. For example, the public should be able to see the schools primary web pages, but there might be parts restricted to only teachers (and students) in that school. Each teacher must be able to set their own permissions, so that some parts of their site may be publicly accessible, other parts restricted to specific groups of students. As much as possible I'd like this tied back to active directory for ease of account maintenance, single sign on, etc.
Suggestions as to how I should think about setting up this site, modules to use, etc. any guidance appreciated.
Thanks
Comments
As I understand you need
As I understand you need multiple sites, one each for each School. Is there any relationship between these different school websites. DO they share users, is there common functionality? Answering these questions will lead you to opting for a Multisite configuration or OG.
You could read more about in my blog.
I also have a short write up on how to configure Drupal for a education website, visit:Drupal in Education
You are at the right Drupal Group! We are all there to support, all the best!
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http://shyamala-drupal.blogspot.com/
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
A few suggestions
Once you have decided how to approach the Multisite vs. OG issue (most likely Multisite since you are on D6), including how to deal with school site admin vs. central site admin, continue with a distributed management and authoring setup. I have some documentation in draft stage at http://re.dialogconsulting.biz/book/distributed-content-publishing. Basically, you combine user roles, content types, permissions and Workflow module to delegate content creation to select users at each school.
For your access rules, instead of thinking about granting access on a per page basis as a teacher creates the page, think about different content types named appropriately, say "Public School A Page" and "Restricted School A Page", and grant node permissions as appropriate. Your teachers at school A will then simply choose the correct content type and have help in choosing from good content type descriptions.
For teacher websites I'd look to pathauto. A [user-raw] token in the generated path (e.g. [user-raw]/[title-raw] will keep things clean and neat, and at [site]/[school]/[user-raw] you could use a view to pull in all pages created by this teacher for a frontpage of their "site". The site admin creates a menu entry for the view and you are set.
Not sure how you can tie all of this back to LDAP other than basic authentication, but site admins can easily assign user roles to teachers to enable access to features they need, so this may be a moot issue.
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Christoph Weber