What's your Drupal recipe for Ministries?
How do you send out your Small Group emails/newsletters each week?
I want our weekly emails to be sent out to our small group members AND posted on our website's front page as a News item.
I've managed to ALMOST accomplish this, but I'm not sure if I'm going the right direction… or whether CiviCRM would solve all my problems, instead.
Currently, I'm using Organic Groups.
I have a Fellowship content type as a group node and News and Event content types as group posts.
This works great. When creating News or Events, there'll be a Groups section that'll let you choose which group to send your News/Events to.
The problem I'm having is Security.
Currently, I have 3 user roles: Anonymous, Authenticated User and Fellowship Staff (There'll be more in the future).
Regular members who register will be authenticated users, allowing them to join various Fellowship groups and receive the newsletters in their inbox via Messaging.
As for the Leaders who'll be sending the emails, they'll be given the role of Fellowship Staff which will give them the permissions of creating News and Event content.
This also works flawlessly. I like it because I can have ONE news content type and ONE event content type which will contain all the news/events of various groups.
However, the problem I'm facing is that once a user is a Fellowship Staff, he has permissions to create news/events for EVERY group he joins. What if a person is a staff of one small group but attends another?
tl;dr: How do you accomplish the task of allowing ministries to write news and events without creating Fellowship 1 News, Fellowship 2 News, etc content types?
Comments
Am I on the right track?
Or should I be using CiviCRM?
Ministries is just a content page??
We're rebuilding our site using Drupal and while I've used other CMSes this is the first time using Drupal. Our working model is that Ministry is a content type with a user_reference field to the Ministry Leader. We have a main ministry page with separate ministry pages/content for each ministry. Their individual pages are where they have content, photos and news postings - basically their "part" of the website.
We also have one content type called News Event which has a field for Ministry. If it's filled in then the view filters will pick it up on the individual Ministry page. If no ministry is chosen it's considered "general news" and appears on the general church news page.
We have a separate role called Ministry Leader which allows ability to edit the Ministry Content types. While it is "open" in that one leader could post/change another's page, we don't consider that an issue (of course we haven't unveiled this yet ). The web team's reasoning is that we're all adults, that every change is logged and tagged with who did it, and that it's more hassle to try and lock down the site as tight as humanly (and technically) possible.
A previous attempt at using a different portal a few years ago was "tightened down" and while it "protected" stuff, we also found that permissions were troublesome to maintain and get just right. The unintended consequence is that people would try something, not be allowed to do it, and would give up bothering to maintain their stuff. Sometimes many days or even a week or two would go by before someone would say "I tried it but couldn't for some reason"...by then their recollection had faded.
We'll know after the holidays during our feedback sessions if it will work and pays off!