For a school website, I envisage:

1)
The pupils are 'authenticated users'. None of the content-types they post will be seen by 'guests' by default. The pupils will not be able to change this setting.

2)
Teachers will ask the pupils to participate in organic groups, forum discussions and blog comments. For instance, they may ask that as part of history, Y7 pupils write a poem about ancient egypt in an OG, discuss slavery in a forum, attach a fictional story in MSWord format to a blog post, etc. None of this will be seen by guests at this point - it's all private.

3)
I envisage that the teacher will then use the book module to create a book-outline called 'Y7 ancient egypt 2008', and then collate a selection of the above nodes, organising them into a kind of navigable 'project' that can be viewed from 'one place' on the website.

4)
However, because the teacher is selecting the material, and will ensure that there is no personal or inappropriate information included in the book, I would like the book to be published to 'guests' (ie. parents - I do not have the resources or inclination to allow parents to have an account; they will only have anonymous access to the school website at this time).

Can anyone give me an idea of how to use Drupal core permissions and/or the 'node privacy by role' module to achieve this? Drupal permissions are different from any other CMS that I've worked with before, and I'm totally stuck - I can't work out where to start, or even if the above scenario is even possible?

Thanks.

Comments

-Anti-’s picture

-Anti- commented

After playing with the privacy by node module, I can see that it's going to help a lot.

If I may continue with my original query though... maybe if I simplify the description of what I need:

· authenticated users always publish content-types that are private by default (ie. only auth users can see them)
· teacher selects 10-20 various nodes connected with a particular subject, and changes the access to public.
· the nodes are added to a book outline so parents can view the 'project'.

1)
Is it conceivable that the teacher edits each node individually, performing two operations:
- adding the node to the book outline
- changing the view permission of the node to 'guest'

That's easy enough to do isn't it?
Although I don't know how complex the books 'drop-down' menu becomes when there are lots of books?
We'll eventually have hundreds.

2)
Is there a better way of achieving this (ie. collating different nodes into one 'project' and making them public)?
I don't particularly like the books module, but it's the simplest way of collating nodes that I know of.

Cheers.

deekayen’s picture

deekayen commented

Roles:

  • anonymous
  • authenticated user
  • student
  • teacher

(note: superuser uid 1 should only be logging in for site configuration and maintenance, not content management)

Configure your global permissions for students to create edit their own blog, forum, and etc nodes as well as access content (everyone will have access content). In Administer > Content Management > Content types, edit the content types students will be creating so they can only view and edit, but make sure anonymous users are not checked for view permission. Since users will need both access content on the global scale and on the node to see the content, the teacher will have to check the anon checkbox as they add it to the book.

I suspect in the future you'll want the views and workflow modules to keep some of this organized.

cyu’s picture

cyu commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)