README.txt 6.44 KiB
DESCRIPTION
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The Organic Groups module (also referred to as the 'og' module), provides users
the ability to create, manage, and delete their own 'groups' on a site.
Each group can have members, and maintains a group home page which individual
group members may post into. Posts can be sent to multiple groups (i.e. cross-
posted), and individual posts (referred as 'group content') may be shared with
members, or non-members where necessary.
Group membership can be open, closed or moderated.
TERMS AND DEFINITIONS
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- GROUP: A single node which can have different content types and users
associated with it.
- GROUP CONTENT: Content such as nodes or users, which are associated with a
group.
- GROUP ADMIN: Is a privileged user with permission to administer particular
activities within a group.
- SITE ADMIN: Compared to group admin, a site admin is granted access to all
groups operating within a site. The site admin can specify the permissions
group admins are granted in order to control their group related activities,
while keeping other permissions out of their reach.
- GROUP CONTEXT: Whenever an individual piece of content such as a node or a
user is viewed, the module attempts to determine if the content is associated
with a particular group.
The group context is later on used to determine which access rights the user
is granted. For example, in a particular group context the user can edit
nodes, but is only allowed to view the nodes in a different group context.
The group context can also be used by custom modules to determine different
behaviors. For example, displaying different blocks on different groups,
switching to a different theme, etc.
- ENTITY: Nodes, users, and taxonomy terms, are examples of Drupal entities.
Organic Groups allows each individual Drupal entity type to be associated with
a group or with a group content. This means that you can associate different
users (as group content) to a certain user (as a group).
GROUP ARCHITECTURE
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At the lowest level the module associates content types with groups. Above this
level is the role and permissions layer, which operates at the group level.
The Organic Groups module leverages Drupal's core functionality, especially the
field API. This means that a content type is associated with a group, by setting
the correct field value.
Users are also allowed to select the groups that will be associated with the
content from a list of groups, which they have authorization to view.
As is the case with Drupal itself, in Organic Groups different permissions can
be assigned to different user roles. This allows group members to perform a
different set of actions, in different group contexts.
INSTALLATION DRUPAL 7.x
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Note that the following guide is here to get you started. Names for content
types, groups and group content given here are suggestions and are given to
provide a quick way to get started with Organic groups.
1. Enable the Group and the Group UI modules.
2. Create a new content type via admin/structure/types/add. Call it "Group", and
define it to be of Group type.
3. Create a second content type. Call it "Group content", and set it to be of
Group content type.
4. Add a Group by going to node/add/group. Call it First group, and enable the
Group through the "Group type" field.
5. Add a Group Content by going to node/add/group-content. In the Groups
audience field, select First group. In the group content view a link was
added to the group.
6. Click on the Group link. In the group view, a new tab was added labeled
Group.
7. Click on the Group tab. You will be redirected to the group administration
area. Note that this is the administration of First group only. It will not
affect existing or new groups which will be created on the site.
8. You are now presented with different actions you can perform within the
group. Such as add group members, add roles, and set member permissions. You
will notice that these options have the same look and feel as Drupal core in
matters relating to management of roles and permissions.
9. You can enable your privileged users to subscribe to a group by providing a
'Subscribe' link. (Subscribing is the act of associating a user with a group.)
To show this subscribe link:
9.1 Make sure you have the Group UI module enabled
9.2 Go to admin/config/group/permissions and make sure that the "Subscribe user to group"
permission is given to the appropriate user-roles.
9.3 Navigate to the "manage display" tab of your content type
(admin/structure/types/manage/group/display)
and choose the Group subscription format for the Group type field.
9.4 Back in the group view you will now notice a 'Subscribe' link (If you are the
group administrator it will say "You are the group manager").
10. In order to associate other entities with group or group content, navigate
to Organic Groups field settings", in admin/config/group/fields.
11. In order to define default permissions for groups that are newly created or
to edit permissions on all existing groups, navigate to the Group
default permissions page. Important permissions in this page are the ones
under the administer section. These permissions are what enable group admins
to have granular control over their own group. This means, that if you as
the site admin, don't want to allow group admins to control who can edit
nodes in their own group, you need to uncheck those permissions.
DEVELOPERS & SITE BUILDERS
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- You may craft your own URLs which produce useful behavior. For example,
node/add/group-content?gids_node[]=4 will add a select the group with node ID
4, in the node form. The prefixed entity can change to indicate other entity
types allowing crafting the URL and you can have multiple variables, for
example, node/add/group-content?gids_node[]=4&gids_user[]=3&gids_group[]=5,6,7
The above URL will select the group with node ID 4, and the group with user ID
3, and the groups with the unique group ID 5, 6 and 7.
Note that the actual entity of group ID 5, 6 and 7 can be any entity (e.g.
nodes or users).
CREDITS
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- Organic groups for Drupal 5 and 6 authored by Moshe Weitzman -
<weitzman AT tejasa DOT com>
- Current project maintainer and Drupal 7 author is Amitai Burstein (Amitaibu) -
gizra.com