[support] Providing ownerships of a subset of the site to user/group

[Fran Fabrizio]

So I appear to have at least two options for dividing the site up into 
pieces and assigning ownership... OGs and separating the databases.  I 
decided to try the OG method first.... sorry for being dense, but a 
couple hours of poking and prodding have not led me to the answer yet. :-)

Let's use the example that I want to set up an OG called "Graduate 
Programs", at the url /graduate.  I've managed to do this, as user 
'root'.  I don't want the front page to be dynamic, just a static page, 
so I found a setting where I could set groups' front page to be content 
type 'page' instead of 'group' (even though this might cause trouble 
later, because other OGs I might want to be more dynamic on their front 
page....is there no way to do this per-OG?)  Anyway, for this particular 
OG at least, 'page' seems to be the best behavior - it got rid of the 
message about there being no public posts and that you ought to 
subscribe to the group - no need to subscribe, in this case, the purpose 
of the OG is not to control who sees the content, but only who creates it.

Now, I want to grant user joeuser at cis.uab.edu (authenticated from LDAP - 
hence the user format) ownership of this area.  He should be able to 
edit the front page of the OG, add any pages he wants underneath that 
page but only underneath that page, and so on....I want the theme 
consistent with the rest of the site, but I think I can enforce that by 
simply having only one available.

I can't figure out the right combo of roles and permissions that I need 
to create/grant to joeuser to accomplish this.

Since I created the group as root, I wanted to change the owner to 
joeuser at cis.uab.edu.  I edited the group and changed the authorship to 
joeuser and that seemed to do something positive, as now when I go to 
the groups list it shows joeuser as the manager.  When joeuser logs in, 
he is able to edit the front page of the group, however he is not able 
to create subpages.

I created a role called gradowner, I added joeuser to gradowner, but I 
don't see how I say "members of the gradowner role can 
own/administer/create content for the graduate programs OG".  I also 
don't see how I can say members of gradowner can only create content 
within the graduate OG - if I grant the ability to create pages and 
stories, they get the ability to do that site-wide and publish that to 
the front page.  I did give gradowner the permission to administer OGs 
(even though I only want him to be able to administer this -one- OG, so 
that might not have been the right move).

Please help. :-)

I have to step back and wonder if Drupal is really the answer for us. 
We want CMS because there's about 8 parties in total that are 
responsible for maintaining our web site, some of whom are not coders or 
savvy with HTML.  Right now, to get material onto the site, they send it 
to me, I format it and wrap the appropriate PHP calls to enforce our 
standard template, and then I publish it.  But I want out of this 
business. :-)  They should own and be able to modify their own parts of 
the site and edit it through a web-based simple form.  I've tried 
several CMSs, and the part I always get stuck at seems to be right here, 
carving up the site and assigning ownership to the responsible party for 
that area.  Now, I've gotten closer with Drupal than I have with any of 
the other products (Joomla and Plone for the most part), but I do feel 
like I am swimming a bit upstream here.  Any advice/pointers much 
appreciated!

I'm also wondering if maybe I should have tried the multiple database 
approach first. :-)

Thanks,
Fran



Larry Garfield wrote:
> This sounds like an ideal job for the organic groups module ("og" to its 
> friends <g>).  
> 
> http://drupal.org/project/og
> 
> The description is mostly about users setting up special interest groups, but 
> it's perfectly effective for having administrators for only specific subsets 
> of a site (where each subset corresponds to an og).
> 
> On Thursday 29 June 2006 17:44, Fran Fabrizio wrote:
>> We are investigating Drupal for our department web site. Right now there
>> is a person or group of persons responsible for each part of the site.
>> When we convert to Drupal, what's the easiest way to give a user or role
>> permission to "own" (i.e. the only ones who can edit that section) a set
>> of pages without giving them permission to edit all pages or to publish
>> pages outside of that area? Is there a module that is set up to handle
>> this sort of "sandbox" model?
>>
>> Concrete example (we are a department in a university). One of our
>> faculty members is in charge of all the pages dealing with the graduate
>> program. In our current site, this translates to all pages in the
>> /graduate area. He owns all of the files in that folder, and can only
>> publish new content to that folder. Another person is in charge of the
>> undergraduate program (/undergrad), a third person is in charge of the
>> continuing education program (/conted), and so on.
>>
>> How best to model this in Drupal?  Is this something that Drupal is
>> well-suited to handle?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>>
>> --
>> Fran Fabrizio
>> Senior Systems Analyst
>> Department of Computer and Information Sciences
>> University of Alabama at Birmingham
>> http://www.cis.uab.edu/
>> 205.934.0653
> 


-- 
Fran Fabrizio
Senior Systems Analyst
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
http://www.cis.uab.edu/
205.934.0653