Hey all,
My name is Courtney and I work as the Web Interface Designer at Johnson County Library in Kansas. We have begun our Drupal journey and are in the process of redesigning our Teen section in Drupal.
First, what sort of access control have you set up at your library? How does that work for you? Any shortcomings/pitfalls? Any awesome-sauce access control awesomeness?
Second, I've narrowed down options to two possible modules: Workbench suite or Organic groups.
This is kind of a new world for me and so I've played around with both modules a little bit and watched/read a bunch of tutorials to get a feel for the type of functionality/interface they provide.
If you have any advice, ideas, commentary, or valuable lessons to share, that would be amazing!
Once we're done with this process at JCL, I will be sure to post a How-to page about Access Control, what worked, what didn't work and recommendations.
Thank you all for your time!
Sincerely,
Courtney
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| ac_compchart.gif | 14.39 KB |
Comments
Hot Topic
Courtney,
This is an exciting post and I like that graphic. Did you make that?
You have addressed the common questions that need asked when creating a new site:
1. What types of users will be using it.
2. What kinds of operations can each user do or not do
3. [THEN here's the big one] Which module(s) do I use and HOW do I configure them to achieve the functionality determined by the answers to the 1st two questions?
I can tell you.... It all comes down to the narrative. If you can tell me a story about "User X" and what they do on the site and what they DON'T do on the site, then you have a strong narrative. After that if you can tell me about "User Y" and then "User Z" then we start to get the full picture.
With all these narratives in a shared document or spreadsheet, the developer can go over it and determine which available modules are best to use as well as how much custom code will be needed. Many times a quick 10 line [or less] custom module will do a quickie permissions check and allow or disallow a certain action by a certain user or role or node, etc.
So... It's ALL in the narrative and the details that come out of it. I don't know if this forum is a good place to dump a bunch of paragraphs about your users and their use cases, but if you like you can connect with me at http://dougvann.com/contact and I'd be happy to spend up to 30min with you on a screen share and look over the situation. I know 1st hand that sometimes a little help like that suddenly brings things together!
Of course, if you think you can pull it off, paste your narratives here and we can look at them collectively.
;-)
Thanks Doug! Right now, we're
Thanks Doug!
Right now, we're still in the early stages of our teen section development. We've got our expression theme, personas, executive summary, development guide, and I've started the site-wide permission schema. I'm currently doing the site building tasks - setting up vocab, content types, menus, views, etc. I hope to be theming early/mid November.
We've only developed narratives for users of the public-facing side of the new site and it's been limited to the Teen section so far. I just talked to my manager today about Access Control, my findings with OG vs. WB and I'll see if I can get some discussion rolling on developing narratives for the contributors. My whole philosophy as a site builder is to be inclusive and make the experience for content creators just as seamless and effortless as a patron interacting with the public-facing side.
It's a tough call though - Workbench or Organic Groups. I'm leaning towards Workbench because a lot of the workflow is streamlined for content contributors whereas I would have to build the workflow with Organic Groups (my content, my files, etc). It's access control is also nice because it's more hierarchical and seems like it would be a good fit. On the other hand, I can't seem to find anything about how it works with Active Directory. I'm going to remain optimistic that it's not an issue because if it were, I'm sure there would be some kind of issue/blog post about it.
Once I get those narratives, I have no problem throwing them up here for people to look at and give feedback. I may be contacting you in the future Doug!
PS: I was lazy with the graphic - it's from my report about Organic Groups, Workbench and Access Control I wrote last Friday in word. I just took a screenshot and cropped it in Photoshop before uploading it here. :)