Kicking the tires of Open Atrium and whether it make sense for a Transition Initiative

It's been awhile since I was in communication with this group - but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in the project, I've just been very very busy. I put together a site with organic groups for Transition Silicon Valley, but the team hasn't adopted using it yet. Meaning I don't know whether the configuration I created will work in practice. Recently I've been using an OpenAtrium site because I write for examiner.com and part of the examiner 2.0 transition is to set up an OpenAtrium site as a private community for Examiners to chat with each other.

I'm rather impressed with OpenAtrium and think it fits a lot of the needs that a Transition Initiative has. To me the primary need is discussion between the members of a Transition Initiative, and most especially to have areas that the individual committees in an Initiative can work together.

OpenAtrium is organized around "groups" (using organic groups under the covers). The groups have a heck of a lot of featuritis available, and you can select specific features for specific groups pretty easily. e.g. a group can have a group blog, a group-specific book (which they call notebook) tree, calendar, "case tracker" for project tracking, "shoutbox" (kinda like a small scale twitter), and other features can be developed and installed.

To me that part looks very useful in that you'd set up an OpenAtrium group for each committee in the Transition Initiative.

Where it falls down is that OpenAtrium is by default private. Out of the box you install it, and all that the public sees is the login/register block. A specific group can be made public (see http://atrium.transitionsiliconvalley.org/films-hope-and-vision) if desired. There's a page in the OpenAtrium documentation that claims to say how to make an OpenAtrium site public, but the menu choice they say should be there is not there. I'm also having a hard time figuring out how to make the home page look interesting.

The method to customize the home page of a Group is with a 'Customize Dashboard' button, a popup window (overlay) comes up and lets you add some stuff that's essentially blocks to the page. I don't think this is Panels under the cover, but something else. I believe Young Hanh is a proponent of Context module rather than Panels. In any case it means the Dashboard page is the home page of a group, and that the design style results as boxes with a title bar and content.

It is a Drupal site so you could go into example.com/admin and change stuff around. But their website has admonitions against doing so because it makes upgrades more complex. I'd written about that in my evaluation of the Features module (http://davidherron.com/content/kicking-tires-drupals-features-module) which is - say person A develops a feature, the feature contains a View definition, and person B installs it, then modifies the View definition? How does person A distribute version 1.1 of the feature and properly update the View definition? Isn't the new version of the View going to screw up the modified version? Actually it seems that in OpenAtrium they have a method for handling this concern but it complicates the install process. I think.