Nicole Bluto

I did a presentation on Drupal 6 Organic Groups for the L.A. Drupal group at Media Temple on Tuesday April 26th. It's really difficult to present such a huge topic in such a short time.

I talked about a project that Jassen and I have been working on called Golf Central Station which relys very heavily on Organic Groups module in Drupal. Golf Central Station allows golf teaching professionals to be listed on the site in a gmap pin map. They can have a red pin if they have a "station" which is an organic group or a green pin if they just have a free profile on the site.

When a golf pro creates a station, the website walks them through a series of forms that are designed to help them populate thier station with content automatically. Their user picture is created, they add thier swing theory, they can add thier facebook and twitter links and when they are done, they will have an auto populated web page that pulls social media information, as well as all the information they added. They can then finish filling out thier content by posting blogs, tip videos and can sell lessons online.

If you want to try out Organic Groups yourself, here are the basic modules that I would start with:

Backup and Migrate http://www.drupal.org/project/backup_migrate (in case you screw up)

Organic Groups http://www.drupal.org/project/og

Token http://www.drupal.org/project/token

Chaos Tools http://www.drupal.org/project/ctools

Panels http://www.drupal.org/project/panels

Organic Groups Panels http://www.drupal.org/project/og_panels

Views http://www.drupal.org/project/views

Admin Menu (just because it makes everything easier) http://www.drupal.org/project/admin_menu

If you have a brand spanking new drupal installation, and you don't know where to put this stuff, you put them in the directory: yoursite.com/sites/all/modules

Drupal gives you the sites/all directories, you have to create the modules directory yourself. Stick your module folders in the new modules directory you have created.

You may see a few errors when you turn on ctools and panels.

Once you do that you can enable them at: admin/build/modules

Turn on admin menu, chaos tools, custom content panes, custom rulesets, page manager, views content panes, Organic Groups, Organic Groups Access, Organic Groups actions, Organic Groups Panels, Organic Groups Views Integration, Backup and Migrate, token, token actions, mini panels, panel nodes, panels, Views and Views UI.

Save.

The first thing we need is a "group node" which is a content type that will become the group. So, let's mosey on to create a new content type here: /admin/content/types

At this time, you should only have 3 content types. Page, story and panel.

You need a new content type. Click on the "add content type" tab at the top of the content area to get started.

You should see:

Let's do:

Name- group

Type- group

Description- This is the group content type. This is the container for all group posts.

submission form settings- Title can be changed to Name of group and Body can be changed to About Your Group

Workflow settings- uncheck promote to home page

Organic Groups- This is important. Choose "group node" see below:

Comment settings: your choice, on or off. I turn them off.

Save.

 

Now, lets configure Orgainc Groups.

Configuration should start at /admin/og/og

It looks like this:

Organic Groups needs a content type that "is" a group node and another content type that can be posted into the group as a "group post". We are going to make a page a group post.

Click on Content Types and you will see the list of all your content types you have created.

Find "page" and click edit.

This takes you to the content type edit form for the page content type.

You want to scroll down to Organic Groups and choose Standard Group Post

Then save.

Alternately, you could create a new content type for your group posts. It's up to you. It was quicker for me not to do a new content type, but that's easy enough to do.

At this point, you now can create a group and post to the group. Yay.

To create a group you just need to Create Content > Group and fill in the form.

To post to the group you Create content> Page and fill out the form. You will have the option to post it to your group. It's that simple.

Let's go back to look at the other OG configurations at /admin/og/og

Here is Group Details

You have alot of options here as to what you want users to be able to do on your site. They are somewhat self explanitory. Obviously the system creates a groups directory that your groups can be listed on. Some of the things that you may not recognise are "audience checkboxes" and "Group Home Page View". The audience checkboxes will show up in the node add form when you create a new group post. If the checkboxes are turned off, Drupal assumes you want to post to the current group. The Group Home page view is coming from the "Views" module and the fact that there is a dropdown here tells us we can make the home page point to any view. Cool. So these choices are personal, so that's all I have to say about that.

Messaging and Notifications

I'm not even going to go into this part. If you want to use this feature, you need to install messaging and notifications modules. At this time it is iffy as to whether these modules are currently playing nicely with Organic Groups. With that said, I'm going to leave that subject alone. For our project, we had to build a custom module to handle messaging and notifications from OG. I know that this feature is currently functional on Groups.drupal.org.

OG Access is here: admin/og/og_access

This is where you have control over where your group posts are able to be posted, and group privacy. Again, these settings are personal and will depend on your project. I'm just letting you know that they are there and you should visit this configuration page and make your choices.

That's pretty much all there is to setting up OG itself.