As promised, here's a brief description on how we plan to use Drupal to fit our needs at the Swedish popular science magazine Forskning & Framsteg.
Since we're not planning on lauching the site for some months, some things will of course change.
- The site is used to publish articles already written, so we'll only have a few users with publishing permission (site admin, editors and one or two semi-admins). The exception is blogs written by scientists, who will share a blogger user role.
- We will probably not use authors in the way Drupal usually does, but will instead have authors as a separate node type (with descriptions, links and stuff). Again, blogs will be an exception (since these are actually entered by the authors).
- We need at least (and probably most) two different roles for "outside users" -- one for our buyers, and one for the non-buyers. We're planning on developing a module to let users enter a code (found in the magazine) to get assigned to the "gold user" (during a limited time for non-subscribers). This will most likely be combined with scheduling and actions modules.
- We're looking at some different ways of tayloring content restrictions. The problem we have is that we want three different levels of acces: no acces, access to article summary, and full access. We also want to be able to change this for individual articles. The most promising way right now seems to be through the template, but I haven't really gotten into that yet. (Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated!)
I'm still in an early stage of Drupal understanding, and three questions I have right now are:
* Do I create problems for myself by adding an author node type, instead of customizing the way Drupal usually handles authors?
* Is there, in general, a good point in keeping the default node types, instead of just building my own with CCK? (With blogs, for example?)
* Should stuff like volume and number go into node fields or taxonomy? Does it matter? For example: does Drupal search taxonomy quicker than node fields, does View module prefer taxonomy terms or node fields, et cetera? As I see it right now, taxonomy is good if terms/node fields are shared between different node types...
Well, that's a description of where we are right now. The next steps will be to compare differnt modules that all fit our needs, and find the spots where we have to craft solutions ourselves.
And yeah, we're planning on using Drupal 5.
Cheers!
//Johan Falk, Sweden
Comments
Some opinions
Johan-
Some thoughts, in order.
You might use a Node Access module for this and tie user roles to their payment level. I believe there are ecommerce modules that let you purchase a role.
I don't think so. See the Node Profile module and the Node Family group of modules. You may have to alter the output template to link to the correct node instead of the normal user page.
Not anymore (Drupal 5+). You can also extend existing node types (like blogs) with CCK fields.
Node fields. This is one of my real peeves with some modules. Using the taxonomy system for anything other than conceptual tagging is an abuse of the core design. An edition has nothing to do with content tagging or context. [Waits for the flame war to start.]
You can create a CCK field for edition that is assigned to all (or most) node types. You might also use Node Reference (CCK) to create an "edition" node and then relate all subsequent nodes to that parent. (Book module would do this as well.)
See http://drupal.org/node/141187 for some ideas.
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
http://savannahnow.com/user/2
http://blufftontoday.com/user/3
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
Thanks!
Thanks a lot for the comments!
I'm browsing through modules right now, and will definately add the ones you suggest to my list of things to try. (I'd never thought of trying the e-commerse module myself...)
//Johan Falk, Sweden
Premium
We use the Premium Module (http://drupal.org/project/premium), and it works fine. Together with the general access control it would allow the three levels of access you describe. Our developer is on vacation right now, but if you're interested he can tell you more when he's back.
As Ken said: probably not. We actually had to work quit a bit to maintain both readers and journalists as users - we wanted to allow our reporters to edit and enhance their own articles and for that we needed reporters as users. But if you don't, it would probably be easier to go with the Node Profile module.
Premium + general access control?
I've (actually!) tried the Premium module, but so far I haven't found a way of making it do what I want (together with the general access control).
The problem is that we want anonymous users to be able to read some articles is full text, so we can't just remove content access for anonymous users. Thus, the Premium module is mainly useful to distinguish the readable-by-anyone articles from the rest. (Which is its intended purpose, as I get it.)
So we're still stuck with finding a way to display the article in one way for ordinary authenticated users, and another for magazine buyers.
Is there a way of granting anonymous users access to some content through general access control? In that case, it would present really neat solutions for us.
Or am I misunderstanding you?
Well, thanks a lot for the comments. I can feel myself climbing further up the knowledge-ladder of Drupal every day... (which is a pretty good indication of how little I know)
//Johan Falk, Uppsala, Sweden
Access and article versions: I think I got it
I think I finally understood how to solve our problems with different kind of access to our articles for different member types (at www.fof.se). I'm posting my ideas here, for anyone who'd like to comment (or has the same problem themselves).
What we want is, basically:
(a) to let ordinary users ("silver members") access some of our content, and some articles in short-versions;
(b) to let subscribers and magazine buyers ("gold members") access all our content (including long-versions of articles); and
(c) to let non-members access a selected few of our articles.
To do this, we will use:
(1) the Premium module, to protect all articles not accessible for non-members; and
(2) some template script to alter the content of articles if (i) user is gold member and (ii) a long-version of the article is available. (I didn't understand that templates could do this until a few days ago.)
Finally, I've found a (I think) neat way of managing silver and gold membership:
The Userpoints module allows automatic role assignments to members who reach certain points levels. In the Userpoints module, points are usually earned by posting/approving articles or inviting new members, but we will instead let members earn points by entering a password found in the printed magazine.
Userpoints do not (yet) have the feature points-for-passwords, but it seems like a task that should be simple (or cheap) enough to develop.
A further benefit of the Userpoints module is that it allows subtraction of (for example) one point per day. This means that the priviliged gold membership may be ended after (say) 30 days, without the need of further hacking/development. Neat, huh?
Added later: The CCK Field Permissions module is made to allow only selected user groups access chosen fields in a node. Thus, applying CCK Field Permissions to a full-article field solves issue (b) above without any hacking of themes.