Meeting Notes - Usergroups.drupal.org – Moshe Weitzman – OSCMS - Tuesday, February 7, 2006

User groups for the Drupal community: What is it?
Will provide the ability for global communities using Drupal to attend local meetings and get together periodically to collaborate. Like “Meetup for Drupal.” These are not the same as workgroups centred around a specific topic, but rather geographical user groups.

Usergroups.drupal.org will provide one central place for all user groups to coordinate and be found, rather than each group having to maintain their own site.

Demo of the usergroups site
Demo site with stock OG installation was displayed and the site was run through to briefly explain the features:

• When creating a group, you select a country (taxonomy-based). Can choose whether to show group in a global directory and whether to show a selection for group on registration form.
• Listing of groups, each showing # of subscribers, group manager, and description. You can also view a list of subscribers and their role in the group.
• Groups are nodes, so things like taxonomy work as expected; can use modules such as Taxonomy View or Taxonomy Browser to sort user groups into categories or view by country, etc.
• Groups are containers for nodes that get added to them (child nodes). These nodes can be of any type (forum topics, events, etc.) and can be broadcast to multiple groups (“audience”) or available publicly.
• Group management: groups have one owner, and an arbitrary number of admins. Admins can control membership, promote/demote admins, and edit/delete content posted to a group.
• Ability to invite a friend to join group.
• Users can subscribe to groups to obtain nodes via e-mail, or subscribe to RSS feeds of each node posted.
• Group context is preserved – when it detects you're looking at a node that's part of a group, will automatically populate blocks, etc.
• Group home page provides a 'mission statement', options to view content as 'River of news' or group by content type. Respects sticky posts.
• Basically, OG is almost like a Drupal site inside a larger Drupal site. A group's page can be themed. Admins have node administer permissions without having node administer privileges. ;)

Blocks:

• Block for content creation options
• 'My Groups'
• 'New Groups'
• Recent subscribers (who's new)
• Others via contrib (Group events block)

Use cases/Feature requests for usergroups.drupal.org

• Meet/Network with other Drupal developers
• Encourage more people to try Drupal/Promote Drupal
• Event calendars, both group-level and global-level
• Collaboration between groups, announce issues so people can all help each other
• RSS syndication between groups
• Event-enabled groups, with “sub-events” to run conferences on Drupal
• Provide information about Drupal in local language- reduce barriers to entry.
• Tie into central site – cross-promote events between two sites (pub/sub)
• Promotion of local user groups through central site (Drupal.org).
• Face-to-face time with other Drupallers, where stuff gets done!
• Can use user groups in lieu of piggybacking to every OS conference.
• Helping Drupal users in their own local language
• Private groups focusing on individual areas
• Get developer/user support locally
• Mail integration
• Hierarchical groups
• Roles within groups
• Associate 'tags' with groups
• Use for DEPs/working groups on particular goals rather than locality.
• A way to find developers, consultants, themers, etc. in group profile – self-promote
• Allow community to aggregate its knowledge
• Communities of support, expertise, etc. -- how to get this out of OGs and into Drupal.org
• Support for custom themeing: colour picker, choose-your-own stylesheet
• Possibility for role-based groups; eventually could move to multisite install with shared users

Next steps

• Find domain to put this on (Moshe)
• Launch site (Moshe)
• Theme (Kieran)
• Clean up event block (John)
• Browse/Find groups (Angie)
• Location/Maps (Dan)
• Hierarchical groups: write up use-cases (Aaron)

Questions/Comments

Move blocks to front page, rather than just sidebars – provide lots of information.

Can blocks be configured per-group?
One property when you create a group is what theme they use. All groups can look different. Plumbing is there for it, but no interface – possibility for a contrib module?

How do roles correlate?
Right now, they don't. But someone could write a contrib module to sync the two.

What about access control? How can I limit access to content?
Four different types of groups:

• open
• moderated
• invite-only
• closed

Integration with CiviCRM groups?
Yes, Gerhard has written this module. Overkill for user groups, unless you want to have an organization that controls all of these groups (more for 100s, 1000s of people).

Permissions for creating closed groups?
No; we want to maintain that flexibility.

Can you promote content out of a group to the site at large?
Yes, you can mark a post “Public” in addition to it being available for the group itself.

Languages? Will German group have to use English?
We can use locale to change the interface, but overall haven't thought through this functionality.

Enable the option to house own website off-site, and point usergroups site to it.
A couple options:

• Ability to enter remote RSS feed, which auto-populates nodes
• Add field to group form to supply external link to parent organization

What about breaking it down further by region (hierarchical relationships between groups? e.g. New York City, Brooklyn, etc.)

• Can do this with taxonomy...
• But there is no “admin of higher-level group can be admin of lower-level group” functionality.
• Write out use cases. What happens to posts? Etc.

Can you create a group within a group?
No, just posts within group – no hierarchical relationships.

Why two different sites?
OG starts off node_access stuff, and this could cause problems with existing nodes on Drupal.org.

Does OG scale?

• For 4.7, OG should be fine; if it isn't we have the skills and knowledge to fix it.
• Under 4.6 you will want to patch your node_access() if running a large site. That patch is already in 4.7