[consulting] OG Roles

[Angela Byron]

neil.mcevoy at ondemand-network.com wrote:
> Hi guys
> 
> Noticed in GoJoinGo that OG has been extended to allow more granular
> control of who can post what types of content to it. Very useful as I'd
> like to be able to delegate to group owners to have more of this level of
> controls etc.

Yeah, I never did get around to submitting this as a patch to the
"official" OG module, both because the functionality wasn't ever quite
100% finished, and also because test users complained about the added
complexity in the UI... it's also pretty specialized behaviour that not
a lot of people need so I doubt it would be accepted as a "core" OG patch.

> Also have spied OG Roles, but couldn't quite figure out its functionality
> from the description, in terms of how you would use it. Can any one
> suggest any scenarios of how it can be used/ what it can enable, to help
> illustrate? It seems like it could be v useful.

OG Roles is kind of a way to delegate assignment of additional site
permissions to group administrators.

In OG 4.7, you can make _any_ node type a group type. So for example,
you could use CCK to create an "official group" and an "unofficial
group" and add these both as group types under administer >> settings >> og.

As you know, you can also setup roles such as "blogger" or whatever, and
give additional privileges (such as "create blogs") to members.

OG Roles was created so that administrators from certain types of groups
(such as "official group") could manage roles (such as "blogger") of
their members themselves, without having to have administrator
intervention every time they want to appoint add another blogger.

To use a "real world" example, I used this module on
http://2006.planet-soc.com/ to give all group administrators the ability
to add group members to either a "student" or "mentor" role. Each role
gets additional privileges throughout the site to do things such as
create blogs and project proposals, where an ordinary "authenticated
user" people can only submit forum topics and comment on things. This
way groups can kind of "police" themselves and I as the administrator
don't have to spend a lot of time checking each new person who signs up
with the Google site to find out if they're actually an accepted
student/mentor with an organization or not.

Note that OG Roles at the present time, unlike the GJG functionality,
doesn't limit the permissions _per group_ but rather treats them as
normal "site-wide" permissions. Therefore, either only hand this out to
group admins you trust, or make the roles kind of piddly so they can't
do too much damage. ;)

-Angie