Organic Groups v Relations

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drupauler's picture

I'm in the process of designing an event management website, my first drupal project. Nothing like starting small.

I'm figuring to define events organised by promotors as Groups and use Relations to drive the social aspects of things, on a "OG defines what you see, relations who you tell" basis.

However the more I look at the design, the less justification there seems to be for using OG. At heart OG seems to be a set of relations with a sophisticated UI for delegated admin. However the UI is over engineered for my needs. So I get the feeling that if I can drive panels via the context of relationships (if the user is my friend show this, else show that) then OG would be redundant.

Now I know its impossible to make detailed comments on a design you haven't seen but I'd welcome your comments on the question, leaving aside the UI, what does OG offer that cannot be done with Relations. What am I missing?

Comments

yes

nicodv's picture

i just finished a network kind of project, started it based on og and entity references and half way i discovered og was bothering me more than helping. To me there was no point of return so i ended mixing relations with entity ref and og. Everything works great now but the inside structure is hard to understand (if you didnt build the site)

the cool thing of og, though, is the "extras" it gives you in relation with rules and staff like that.

Bottom line is im starting a new social network and im not using og, i'll see if i miss it in the near future.

hope i helped and good luck

nico

OG is weird and I can

reubenavery's picture

OG is weird and I can certainly understand the confusion and handwringing when trying to decide to go this direction vs entity references vs relation vs everything else out there.

IMO: OG really shines and is a great start when you need different people to have different levels of access in certain content type collections.

I'm not too psyched about how invested in Panels the 7.x-2.x branch is, however.

As a non-coding noob Ive been

drupauler's picture

As a non-coding noob Ive been trying to sort out how best to use relationships and OG for a social networking site (I've been working through PACKT Drupal 7 SN book which was an excellent intro).

I've taken to chanting, 'groups control what people can see, relationships control who you tell'. Though I may end up with users having groups of followers and do away with relations entirely.

My big concern is/will be performance but the major overhead of OG (AIUI) is associated with having authenticated users and SN users are going to be authenticated whichever design I adopt. Beyond that I get the feeling there are more efficient ways of doing stuff but I suspect that involves coding bespoke solutions which right now is beyond me.

Some of the extensions to OG look very interesting, especially for Workflow; it could make for a very clean design.

I really do wish I knew what I was talking about...

I can half-agree

PlayfulWolf's picture

Yes, I agree, that OG is an overkill, but... there are still no substitute for it - except if you build everything with low-level modules and still you start to miss some functionality when 50+% of work is done and there is no way back.

For example, I am working on OG based site and I need so much Nodecomment (D7) module, because node->comment->comment structure is so much pain to deal - all the subsequent building is 5x harder because of different entities. Some will say: there are Entity/Referen modules which can substitute default Comments system, but I can state, that at this moment they are not even close to having half functionality most of them only being on proof of concept level.

Right now you cannot throw away all the node ecosystem, so stick with it and respect OG maintainers.

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