I have a new non-profit client, a guild, that wants to upgrade their site to have multiple bloggers (300 members), various forms of e-commerce (member dues, show entries, online and brick & mortar museum store, and possibly member sales).
Currently they have one domain. If I can't convince them the museum should have its own domain, would OG be a good alternative to doing all this in one domain? I have only played with OG on my local dev. Thinking the groups would be the guild, the museum, and individual artists.
How well does Drupal commerce work with OG?
The first big thing is moving 300 members, with the average age of 70, to Drupal from Wordpress (with my little experience with WP, it already has four strikes against it. IMO).
Any comments or suggestions?
Comments
Could you set up the roles to
Could you set up the roles to be guild, museum and artist, then have the Content Access module allow the author to set the permissions on a per node basis?
Run for your life.
Gotta love nonprofits. My advice: before you even start researching technical approaches get client expectations in line with their budget.
As presented this is a project for a four person team (five if you count project management), with budget requirements in keeping with complexity.
Now to answer your question:
OG is a credible approach to silo'ing content into multiple internal "groups". You can use group admin permissions to selectively grant edit/delete permissions to grouped content and group enrollment to limit the areas a user can publish content to.
For additional granularity you can do content access, assuming you have a strong constitution and graph paper to document the resulting permissions grids.
Vin diagrams all around.
I am wondering if I have not bitten off more than I can chew. I have been pointing out their ambitions will require guild members to maintain and monitor many aspects (like the blogging).
There current site has not been maintained in two of three years, that's not to promising. This project started out as just updating their site. If wishes were horses...
Be stout of heart
I don't think you've bitten off more than you can chew, I think you're just in the phase of your project where your client is stuffing the spec with anything and everything they can think of that would be "cool". If they're having issues with basic site maintenance that's either a very bad sign regarding their ability to maintain the site build you are describing or an excellent opportunity to negotiate a monthly support retainer.
At my current job, when we run into a similar situation what we typically do is go ahead and spec out the minimum requirements to update a site and call this phase 1. The client is welcome to continue adding things to the wish list and they can be specced individually as Phase 2 through Phase N. This keeps our deliverables sane and prevents the client from grossly overshooting their budget as new phases can be started as budget becomes available for the work.
That's right
I shot a (diplomatic) missive across their bow explaing that their desires will be constrained by their budget and member envolvement. That had the desired effect of reining them in a little, and making them realize baby steps, and one foot in front of the other. haha
That will likely be required,
That will likely be required, as well. Thanks for the heads up. That aspect is going to be a trick as well, in that some members would be all three, others only of two, some only of one role and/or group.
I was thinking OG in order to theme the sections differently, and control who has access.
I can set up DC to have different product types that could correspond to the different entities selling. A brief search tells me DC does not have a viable POS for the brick and mortar store, and the POS for Ubercart has not been ported to D7. The B&M museum store is physically inside an art center. I don't know for sure how all of these entities are set up financially.
Again, a lot of this could be resolved, if everyone had their own domains, especially the artists.
A single domain
I'd try to make everything work under one domain simply for content sharing and SEO. But first, I'd document what they would 'like' to have versus what they 'must' have. You nailed it when you wrote that their list right now sounds quite ambitious. And who will pay to have each artists sectioned themed differently? After that discovery process, you may find that OG is more than they need or want to pay for.
The maintenance (or previous lack of) carries a considerable amount of weight.
Domain and SEO
I was thinking the museum would do better with having its own domain, instead of having two pages on two different sites, as is current. I see your point of the content sharing. Would the SEO come from having the traffic all being on the single domain (instead of multiple)? (I think I just answered my question.) Would that not also kind of happen, if there are all delivered from the same server and have cross links and feeds? Like a multi-site install?
Single site
My thought on SEO was that you'd have better chances and get the most bang for your buck with inbound links going to a single site rather than two. A friend of mine is quick to point out that, 'Inbound links are the Holy Grail of links.'
gotcha
I understand. I was thinking some of that would be helped if they were separate in providing some of those inbound links. They could have 300 from the members right of the bat. Maybe that could be a prerequisite for setting up the artist sales and blog pages, make them have outbound links to the guild and museum, that could make 600.
And the Crème de la Crème for inbound are from .gov or .edu. Maybe they could get an art dept. at an edu. to set a link.
Misguided thinking?
Am I thinking of those links the wrong way - having separate domains and cross-linking the sites? There are still a lot of things I am learning about all this web design stuff, and don't claim to be expert, but always willing to learn.
300 Domains?
I believe if you have 300 domains cross linking, running on the same Ip address (or even same class C IP range), the search engines (particularly Google) may see them as a link farm, and blacklist the entire lot. Though I may have misunderstood what you were suggesting.
David Minton, Managing Partner, DesignHammer | Durham, NC, USA
You are right
No, you are right in understanding my suggestion. My question "Would the SEO come from having the traffic all being on the single domain?" would have been more correct with IP or C IP range instead of domain. skowyra's initial assertion is correct.
I certainly don't need to get them blacklisted. Thank you for clarifying and setting me straight. There really is so much more I need to learn. Thanks to all for letting me lean on the group for greater understsanding.
Same domain problem as well?
If there were 300 artists pages under the same domain as the guild and museum, they would not want to be linking to the guild, museum or each other for the same blacklisting issue, right? All the artists, the guild and museum should be on different domains and servers for their links to each other to be the most effective.
No Problem
If all 300 artists are under the some domain, then their cross-links are just internal links to the website. Search engines will see all of the content as a single website.
I think you will likely need to do a lot of work to insure a network of 300 cross-linked websites don't look like an attempt to skew search engine results, especially since that is what it seems like you are trying to do. Also, how much is it going to cost to run 300 Drupal servers, and keep them patched?
On the other hand, a website with hundreds, or thousands of pages, with hundreds or thousands of incoming links should do well. If each artist gets around three incoming links from other websites, your combined website should have over one thousand incoming links.
David Minton, Managing Partner, DesignHammer | Durham, NC, USA
not intentionally
I was not trying to game the system intentionally. I was thinking the guild and museum sites would benefit, if all the member artists had links on their personal sites, but then the ip of the same server came up.
It would really be best, if all the artist had their own sites on servers around the world (despite being called an American guild some of their members are in other countries). A number of the artists do have their own sites (albeit some needing serious updating). To that end, I was thinking rss feeds from artists sites on the guild page would give them representation on the guild site, and not have to build out those pages on the guild site.