Posted by jmr3460 on January 12, 2013 at 5:37pm
Welcome to DNA. We talk about creating a Drupal profile for NA service committees here. Please feel free to discuss any Drupal related topic that will enhance the creation and maintaining of this Drupal Profile. Keep coming back.
Comments
Hey mark
I'm here ready to help out.
I have been looking at this
I have been looking at this page a bit to start with. http://drupal.org/developing/distributions
First things first we should probably do a little planning. What should an NA profile Distribution of Drupal look like. I am thinking home page, calendar, contact page, meeting list, ect. I have been looking at geofield and gmap module a bit. I am not sure how the BMLT is going to work. The problem I am having with it at this time is users are having to login to a different site to make any changes, then go to the regional site once they have finished. It is a bit confusing for some of these guys. If we could work on a content type for meetings and groups directly from Drupal databases, then they login and make their changes and view on the same website.
Once we get a site working the way we think it should be then we can start creating a profile.
Let me know what you think.
Existing site migrations, nice to's, bmlt integration
I have a few NA sites (some Drupal, some not) under my management so my interest has a lot to do with migrations into a common distro. I already have similar structures in two of the regional sites I manage. (Three convention sites I have are just about exact copies. Even down to the Ubercart product nodes.)
From experience a site needs these basic items:
Some really nices:
I have had no complaints about the features on these sites, http://tbrna.org/ & http://lsrna.org/ (notice the sameness?). The Minnesota region has a rich feature set that we could choose from.
BMLT is a module so it is entirely optional. But it is a must in my part of the world because our current database has 30 service bodies (areas) and 1878 meetings listed. The separate database management login is kind of necessary to keep the services separate. It is the same when you integrate your Flickr photos, Vimeo episodes, and feeds from Facebook and Twitter. As with these web services, the bmlt serves data to sites built with different platforms thus requiring separation. For a more seamless user interface we could include a styled bmlt login from the site that way the meeting maintainer is not required to open two browsers.
The idea to use the Drupal database will be okay for local listings only. In my case, all of Oklahoma and nearly all of Texas is in the bmlt database.