Blog: Intranets

Leveraging Organic Groups and Context to Extend Custom Features Within Groups

We do a lot of work building portals and intranets that provide collaborative online spaces for professional communities. Some of these projects are completely private sites, and some are open to larger user groups. In each case we need to provide a toolset that could be configured differently for each site and frequently tweaked in particular groups. To do this we've built Spaces. It's a module that leverages Organic Groups to relate users and content to groups, and it extends context_ui to define 'features' that can be control individually in each group.  Spaces also makes assumptions about how you want groups to work and so is able to reduce the options available when creating groups and posts in groups, making the group creation and content posting processes more intuitive.

To get a sense of how this module works I have taken two screen shots from our own intranet package that we call 8trees. Here you are looking at our own team space on the 8trees install that we run for ourselves to communicate with our clients.  It provided us with a terrific way to test code and ideas on a captive and critical (but forgiving) audience. Clients never know there is anything but their own little space, but we move quickly and easily between them and have different tools (blog/book/casetrack/calander) turned on for different clients depending what stage the project is in. This is what spaces lets us do.

Included in the spaces suite is a core set of feature definitions that provide features for things like the blog and book modules. Additionally there are feature definitions for a calendar, a shout-box, and a case-tracker. When you create a group with Spaces enabled it changes the creation a bit, limiting the kind or group you can create to simply 'public' or 'private' and allows you to select what features should be available inside that group. If it's only appropriate for your group to have a blog, you can limit it to that. If your group needs a more substantial feature set, say a blog, book, and calendar, you can configure that for the group.  Spaces also lets you change labels in a group, so if a set of users doesn't want a 'blog', but needs a 'discussion' they can have it without need to to change any code or use the locale module. Here  is how the setup looks:

If You're In Boston, Join us at Lucky's Lounge for Happy Hour Tonight

Three exciting happy hours are happening all in one place tonight, so if you're interested in Drupal and Nonprofits, Intranets, or News, swing by Lucky's Lounge tonight to meet others working in these areas and unwind after the first day of Drupalcon with a few drinks. Come on, it's only three blocks away from the Convention Center. Map.

When you leave the Convention Center, make a left on Summer Street, walk two blocks and make a right on A street. Lucky's is right at the intersection of A and Congress. Be sure to get there early - the first couple of rounds will be picked up and food will be available to order.

Here's the line up:

• Drupal and Nonprofits, 6:00 pm
• Intranets, 6:00 pm
• News, 7:45 pm

We're hosting the Drupal and Nonprofits events, along with Gregory Heller, and want to bring people together who develop and use Drupal at nonprofit organizations. It will be great to share stories, experiences, and needs with others working with - or at - nonprofits. The Intranets event will definitely be eye opening as people building intranets and portals with Drupal come together to show off what they're doing.

After these wrap up the News happy hour will kick off at 7:45, organized by Ken Rickard, Michael Meyers, and Gary Kebbel. This sounds like a great chance for developers working on news platforms to meet people in the news industry. 

Hope you can make it!

Bring People to Your Portal Painlessly

There’s one website I read nearly every day, and that's MIT Technology Review. The site emails me between 3:00 and 4:00 am, usually well after I’ve shut down my computer for the evening, with a list and brief summary of interesting stories. This is one of the first emails I open when I log back into my computer in the morning and, more often than not, it baits me over to the MIT Technology Review site.

Handle Your Content More Intelligently

There are smarter ways to handle your events than with a classic calendar on groupwise. We recently installed the MIT Timeline module for CommNET, a staff intranet at The World Bank that helps its geographically disperse teams communicate better. Here is a screencast by Ric Castro, the site's lead architect, that shows how he uses Timeline to nicely handle multi-day events and run quick filters. Here at Development Seed Jeff has been working on this module a lot and is maintaining it for Drupal 5.