I've been coming to terms with organic groups for the past few months and feel like I'm trying to apply the wrong tool to for the job. One of the great, yet complicated, things about Drupal is that there are many ways to achieve the same result.
Personally I think Organic Groups has a lot to offer, but you can also go a long way down the wrong use case before opting for a more suitable choice.
One use case that I think we can all agree that if you want to create groups and create content that is only accessible to that group, then Organic Groups is your module.
One feat that I've been struggling to achieve with Organic groups is to associate Staff w/ the company they work for so that if they publish articles into our main feed (think news site that references user/user company at the end and displays a content feed of published content by that company's staff on an organic group profile "Company").
In this case I'm thinking about going the relations route, but personally if i would have known that Organic Groups was or wasn't meant for this use case, I would have saved mysef a week of contemplation.
To help others know when and when not to tap into the power of Organic Groups, what use cases have you succeeded with Organic Groups and what use cases have you found just weren't meant to be?
This really is a powerful module for running groups, but understanding what use cases it really fits would simply be a blessing for many!
Comments
Please Clarify
Ryan258,
You quite clearly summarize one of the main problems I have with the drupal.org site but have as yet been unable to put succinctly. Many options means a higher likelihood of finding exactly what you need - this is vital. But the organization, information modules provide, etc, all contribute to great difficulty in deciding upon those options.
I'm struggling to understand your use case though. What do you mean by:
"main feed" - is that a news feed, is that the "tracker", etc.;
"references user/user company" - who or what references, and what exactly is the ref to;
"at the end" - of what?
"displays a content feed" - do you mean that one site publishes an e.g. ATOM news feed, another site picks it up etc.
That said, it depends on which version you're asking about. I still can not quite wrap my mind around the D6 version. It seems it tried to do all these different things that weren't exactly 'hand and glove'. D7 on the other hand does seem to do one thing and do it well. As I understand it, that, within one site, it controls 'who can see what'. With other contrib modules you can add 'who can do what' and other things.
Anyway, this is a good question so please give us a little more detail so everyone can benefit.
Eric