I'm curious how much work/how feasible it would be to extend Drupal to have a more flexible based group permissions system. I understand that you can setup "user roles" and assign a user a role, then define that roles permissions. However, this is very very limited.

I'd like to see a system where multiple groups can be created, each group has it's own permission settings. Then a user can be a member of multiple groups.

A new admin section might be needed, where the site admins assign a user to a group. Or, each group might be able to have it's own administrator, who has authority to add or delete users from their own group.

In addition, the main site admin could juggle users around into/out of various groups as they saw fit.

In addition, I'd like to see the group permissions extended where users could create a group. Then, the users could define what nodes or content or calendar/events, etc... can be accessed by the public at large, or by the user assigned groups.

This would be basically extending drupal more towards the PHProjekt style of user/group permissions. Instead of dwelling in the land of CMS, moving more into the land of CMS/GroupWare based systems. A lot of the basics to Drupal would lend itself well to expanding into GroupWare, just none of the controls exist to manage this.

Any thoughts? Basically, I want to use PHProjekt for my use, but it's too GroupWare oriented, and Drupal is too CMS and not enough GroupWare oriented.

I'm increasingly confident in Drupal 4.1.0's release readiness. As such, chances are we'll release Drupal 4.1.0 within two weeks. I've seen quite a few production sites that use the Drupal 4.1.0 release candidate, yet it is desirable to have it tested in a diverse set of setups. If you have a Drupal 4.0.0 site and you want to help quality assurance testing, consider upgrading now.

We are currently working on a redesign of Drupal's administration pages; the goal is to improve usability for both novice and experienced Drupal users. Michael Angeles, a long time Drupal user/contributor, has been blogging about the redesign so make sure to check out his Drupal-related blog entries.

Bill Humphries wrote:

Frank Booseman would like blog tools to support walled garden posting. He's inspired when a friend would love to post photos from a party, but not to the whole world. Live Journal, which I've been playing with lately, supports this. It can, because it's a monolithic (on the server-side) application. I created a LJ account, and friends who were already there added me to their 'friends' list, and added them to mine. They post a private entry, and their friends see it, but not others.

Pete Prodoehl suggested to look at Drupal, to which Bill responded:

Drupal's a nice system, but it doesn't do what I really want: I'd like a system which does not require the user to set up an account. I'd like to get a token in the request that says "I'm Jane User, and here's my assertation that I'm Jane User", and since Jane User is my friend and her assertation could be verified (though a public directory, or because someone I trust has signed her key), she gains access to the friends and family-only materials on the server without signing in. And, the key piece is that this may be the first time she's been on the site.

Live Journal can do that because all the journals are part of the application, and I sign on once. Any LJ user can recognize me as their friend, and I get access to their friends-only materials.

The godsawful piece is the public key infrastructure.

Which reminds me of this blog entry where Paul Bausch describes how he experimented with PGP-signed comments and how he think it would be a good way to verify identities. The talented folks behind MovableType picked up the tread saying that it could possibly be used to build a web-based verification service with a trust web.

As online communities (incl. the weblog community) continue to grow, and as more and more websites become interactive, identity theft might become a big enough problem that we'll want to deal with it. An interesting challenge for 2003?.

I wrote a wiki module for version 3.0 (it was working but still needed some more development) and am wondering if it is worth updating it to 4.1 I stoped development mainly because I dont have a wesite to host a site on and because I found that drupal was still a little primative so I thought I might wait for further development before continuing. I would like to know if anyone else would like a wiki module. Also there are basically 2 options, either create a new node type (this is what I did basing it off the colaborative book) or create a filter type module (similar to smilies etc) and I would like to know if anyone has any preferences.

Drupal supports RSD (Really Simple Discoverability) by means of the rsd.module, which can be found in the contributions repository.

Really Simple Discovery is a way to help client software find the services needed to read, edit, or "work with" server/weblogging software.