OpenAtrium Group Manager as Content Administrator

In Drupal, it only takes a couple hours (or perhaps a couple days) to build the concept of a site-wide content manager into your system. It gets mighty tricky to start parceling out administrative tasks for parts of the site.

With Organic Groups (the module behind OpenAtrium’s groups), the solution to this problem has always been messy. But with the advent of Spaces and Group Administrator configuration, it seems like OA and related sites are within shouting distance of giving Group Managers the power of Content Administration.

Between my OA Change Group and OA Book Manager modules, I’ve started experimenting with how to bring that kind of capability to light.

OA Change Group adds a new subtab to admin/content/node. That works fine, for site-wide administrators. It also allowed me to punt on the whole notion of double-checking that the logged in user has the right to post content to the destination group. But it doesn’t help group managers, except to the extent that the site admins are ready and willing to take content management tickets.

OA Book Manager takes a cue from the content-management-lite Archive feature in OA, and slaps a sub-tab into the feature it’s related to. In this case, adding a “Manage” tab to the Notebook feature.

But if OA content management is going to remain a cohesive experience for site administrators and group managers alike, a few more best practices need to be worked out, and OA needs to come packaged with more of a skeletal administration system in the groups themselves so feature-builders know what to be thinking about in working together.