Deprecated - Social software and communities

There's a very limited description of an OG Book module, and in the forums people are saying the module is no longer being maintained. From the sounds of it, this was a very helpful feature to OG module. Why was it abandoned? Is there any other (perhaps better) way to get this functionality (collaborative, hierarchical documents with permissions based on OG membership)?

I've been grumbling around with this on my own for too long, now. Wondering if anyone has any practical insights, or just a wee bit of direction-

Unique Groups A B C...Z are maintained by a role of 'editors'

For each A, B, C...Z there is a limited array of roles that are uniquely assigned to a growing pool of posters.

eg- poster Judy is assigned to Role 1 in group A and to Role 2 in group C

I am in the planning stages of creating a community portal. Although I definitely want it to be a platform where community groups can set up their own pages, blogs, and groups, I'm also looking to having a general forum for all kinds of topics, a business directory, real estate listings, local school information, etc. Basically anything that you could want to know about our rather small town, I want to make it possible for someone to post it. I plan on supporting this site by selling advertising to local businesses and google adsense.

I hope I am posting this is the right place.

I have a scolling LED sign, and I have been working with php to hook it up to my webserver. I now how a prototype where people can leave messages, which get written to a database and squirted out of the com port direct to the sign.

I'd like to incorporate some Drupal functionality, I think it would be cool to get 'who's on-line' but I am not sure where to look for this information.

Can anyone help me out?

Thanks Paul

For some reason, CiviMail (still a developer version) requires Postfix.

Unfortunately, my host uses exim. And because exim is heavily integrated into cPanel, this is going to be hard to change.

So, has anyone else faced this problem and gotten exim to work with CiviMail?

Or is it possible to somehow get postfix and exim to work in parallel??

And, as newbie mail administrator, I have to ask: Isn't it possible to write to an email interface, as opposed to writing to/hardcoding in an application?

I've upgraded a CS install to Drupal 4.7 to build a community site with lots of groups. Organic groups for 4.7 has no collaborative node since og_book is not being maintained. Book pages are too fixed in a hierarchy anyways. Page module has "edit own pages" permission which I have no use for. How hard would it be to make it an "edit pages" permission?

The concept is this, we are a political party and we create policy documents etc. which is always a collaborative process. Subscribers to policy groups should be able to edit any page in the group. Yes, I know I can give them all "administer nodes" permission but that is way more than they want to deal with. Documents (releases, resolutions, platform etc.) only need to be categorized etc. when they are published.

I thought I could use Liquid wiki node but they have put the edit permission (with others) in the access part.
When I see all the access control and moderation functions in modules and the fact that most nodes are editable by their creators only I wonder whether all these control mechanisms have anything to do with groups and community. Do they get applied effectively? I think online communities need to be organized with open collaboration as the default configuration for most nodes. The simple desire to "be published" and a fully open process is usually enough to restrain extremists. If they don't cooperate and produce acceptable results nothing gets published. Organic groups provide sufficient ability to exclude undesirables if necessary.