By water-1 on

Well not today actually, in August when my holiday is over is more accurate ;) oh and please be patient with types etc. I've this heavy fever kicking around in my head...

Since the Drupal 4.5.0 release schedule (http://drupal.org/node/view/9023) has been posted I've started thinking about the user, permission & taxonomy related features keeping me from deploying drupal in house at work. A while back Kjartan gave me (and two collegues) a very good demonstration of Drupals possibilities, (thanks again Kjartan :)) and during and after that meeting we have been discussing the following points internally :

I suspect that a fair amount of this is already possible using modules, but I would really prefere these things to be in the core. I have not been able to track down any information stating the plans for drupal regarding my thoughts below, and have not yet gained good enough knowledge or drupal so I might be asking for already existing features.

  • Role and/or group based pages, nodes & blocks; In my organisation we want to show the employies different information based upon what kind of job they have. The consultants have other needs the leaders, the people on the switchboard, the economy people, etc. So basically we want to be able to push the most relevant information to the screen depending to reduce everyones time spent clicking on links to find the most relevant information.
  • Role and/or group based access; Basically we want to be able to publish information that will only be accessable to those who belong to the right groups. This could be members of a trade union, the top leaders, supervisors, etc.
  • MyDrupal; Functionality so that each user can choose the content of one or more blocks in different sections of the site. In addition every user would typically have there own MyDrupal page that they completely controll the content of. This could be an extention of the profile page, a page where you find & controll everything about yourself & your interests.
  • Groups; We to be able to categorize the emploies into groups, and have them inherrit that groups rights. It should also be possible to be a member of several groups and nested groups in an hierarki. An example could be that all consultants are granted access to a discussion forum for topics that aren't mature enough for the general public and at the same time they also have access to diffrenet dicussion forums of they're unions, but not each othors unions.
  • "Interactive" taxonomy; We would like the taxonomy to control the content on chosen parts of each page. If I'm reading an article about mobile phones, I would automatically want drupal to show me links to related articles in a block without any action taken by any if the authors, a part from them giving the articles some kind of metainformation during publishing.

Though I probably could have drawn up a better picture of I'm looking for what's most important for me right now is to get a clearer idea of where Drupal is heading reagarding these things.

I'm also very interested in hearing from people who have simelar needs and/or thoughts regarding these topics, and I might (note the word might, I'm not saying I've got piles of money laying around :O) be interested in / able to take part in some sort of collabortive financing of development towards the ideas in this post.

And to finish it all of for today, please move this posting if it's should't be in this forum...

:water

Comments

JonBob’s picture

JonBob commented

I can't address all your concerns, but I'll respond to the bits I know about.

I suspect that a fair amount of this is already possible using modules, but I would really prefere these things to be in the core.

Everyone prefers that their pet features make core, of course, as that simplifies setup for that user. However, to maintain its slim profile, Drupal needs not to try to be everything to everyone, but rather to provide the necessary infrastructure for modules to build on. If modules are of high quality and useful to a large percentage of the user base, they are included as part of the distributed package; that doesn't mean that modules that are not part of the package are useless.

Role and/or group based access; Basically we want to be able to publish information that will only be accessable to those who belong to the right groups. This could be members of a trade union, the top leaders, supervisors, etc.

This is a popular request, and there are multiple implementation attempts floating around. I've got what I feel is a pretty solid framework in my sandbox, and am pushing to get this included for the 4.5 release. That would mean that module developers could bolt on their own access schemes without patching core, which is the biggest hurdle in the way of deploying most of the contributed solutions.

Groups; We to be able to categorize the emploies into groups, and have them inherrit that groups rights. It should also be possible to be a member of several groups and nested groups in an hierarki. An example could be that all consultants are granted access to a discussion forum for topics that aren't mature enough for the general public and at the same time they also have access to diffrenet dicussion forums of they're unions, but not each othors unions.

Drupal's roles allow for some of this. The system in 4.5 will allow for users to belong to multiple roles, which greatly increases the flexibility of configuration. Hierarchical organization of the roles is not possible; that's one thing Gerhard's groups.module brings to the table. The rest of your request relates to the node permission issue, I believe.

I'll leave the other topics to people who are more familiar with them.

epicflux’s picture

epicflux commented

I don't know if you still care about the “Interactive” Taxonomy ideas…

I have created two “Interactive” Taxonomy blocks that appear on node pages...

First one pulls the taxonomy of the node and displays it in the way that I want. The terms separated by their parent vocabs... i.e. Topic terms are displayed in a separate list from Location terms.

I have seen some "related nodes" modules floating around, but nothing that met my needs...

I have created my own related nodes module. When a node is inserted or updated it gathers all the nodes categorized under the same terms, puts all that into an array, then weights each node depending on how many times it appears in the array. Then inserts the top 5 in a table. The module also has a block that pulls the results for display. It seems to be working well so far...when I am done building my site I will share it with the community...

Kieran Huggins’s picture

Kieran Huggins commented

Would this idea solve your permissions problem?

http://drupal.org/node/14046

Cheers,

Kieran

Tommy Sundstrom’s picture

Tommy Sundstrom commented

Are you sure you are not trying to solve the wrong problem?

I've been a consultant building web sites for ten years now, and seen a lot of plans like yours. Without exception they fail.

To actually provide different groups with tailored content, you need a lot of editorial resources - much more than most organizations are prepared to spend on an intranet. Same thing with administering a lot of different groups, and channeling different material to them.

In reality, you will also discover that it also is difficult to differentiate the groups. While you may be able to find extremes with special information need (like maybee the switchboard operators you mentioned) - you will find that the difference between "consultants", "leaders", "economy people" is not so clear cut, and that most of the time you will end sending most of the information to most of the people.

Your plan focus on the exceptions from this. Probably it would be a much wiser use of time/money to focus on making the normal case easier to use.

IF you anyhow decide that you need the described functionality, maybe you should consider another system. While it surely can be done in Drupal, I belive that for example Plone would give you a better platform for building a complex web of groups and permissions.