Sourcefusion

Although I subscribe to the ideas in the book (see my previous post) that you need to write user stories and follow an architectural approach, my main goal here is to see whether Organic Groups provide features I need in the next version of my website.

The site evolved from a relatively static site, where all pages were hand-crafted to a simple Drupal site last year. The main reasons for switching were a hard disk crash in our server and a growing need to simplify the way content was added to the site. In the current version, I’m assisted by a web editor, who is able to convert much of the incoming information to relevant content types. So the initial goal was reached.

During this year, the need for private pages came up. This was a long standing request, that I couldn’t solve easily with the previous version of the site, but with the help of the Content Access module was fairly simple to set up in Drupal. Right now, users need to subscribe to see the private pages, and a registration request is manually verified by me before granting it. After all only members of the Society are allowed to register.
This is a tedious task and prone to errors as I discovered yesterday: more than 6 months ago I accidentally granted a user the Administrator role, fortunately without much problems. Also, since I need to do this manually, it might take a while before I find some time to doing it.

So the next version will need to have the following functionality:

• Automatically verify if the user registration request comes from a legitimate Society member. I already have some additional fields in place and I have an Excel sheet with relevant information on current members. So I need to either find a module or build one myself that is capable of matching a request to the Excel information and automatically accept the user when his credentials are found. After that he or she needs to be automatically granted the ‘members’ role.
• There will be several user groups on the site. All users will be ‘members’, but some will have additional roles, varying from ‘teachers’ to ‘moderators’ (of a forum or other website parts) to ‘web editors’ (who can add different kinds of content). At first, being careful, I’d like to be the only one to grant the additional roles, but when things get out of hand, I might want to delegate some of the responsibility.
• There is restricted access for parts of the site. For starters, there will be a ‘members-only’ section with Pages and Stories. In the future, this might be extended to include a forum.
• There is a long standing request from the teachers group for a restricted forum. Since the number of teachers is small, it’s ok to manually assign a ‘teacher’ role to the relevant users. However, I need a complete list of teachers for this.

This is it for now. I’ll add more requirements if they show up in the course of this write-up.