Geeklog Forums

I've been a Geeklog lover since the wee early hours of yesterday morning. I'm amazed at what I've been able to build in so short a time. And I'm equally amazed by the solid and respectable look and performance of what I've built. Kudos to any and all who've been involved in putting this stuff together.

But now that I've played for a day and integrated static pages, geekery, file mgnt, project status, menus, faqs (and a few other plugins I've probably forgotten) I'm trying to plan out how to build a specific site. And I'm a bit bewildered by the organization of the content. So this is my attempt to use you guys as a sounding board. Is the following explanation more or less right, or am I barking in the wrong garage?

The principle organizational element of GL is the Story. Stories are displayed on pages according to the Topics to which they are posted. One topic = one page. All of these pages are special display cases of the root-level index.php url. So the Topic block is a menu that does not act as a menu for the entire site, but only for the topic pages of grouped stories.

In addition to the Story content, there are other page types, such as File_Mgmt, Calendar, Static Page etc - usually associated with a particular plugin. Each of these pages is a distinct url within the GL file system. So just as the root index.php controls access to a variety of display pages of story content, these other plugins (also called index.php but under different subdirectories) each control access to one or more display pages of its own kind of content.

In a nutshell, Geeklog's header menu does not offer access to pages, but to 'chapters' of the site. Once into a chapter, the navigation for the pages within that chapter are a bit inconsistent. Stories use the Topic block whereas most other plugins use some kind of custom selection system embedded within the center-block displays controlled by the plugin itself. (For the longest time, I was viewing the Topics display as the menu.) Very confusing. And to make it more confusing, the Static Pages show up as individual entries in the header menu - they don't conform to the content-driven chapters idea I was starting to understand.

Of course, this leaves me with a bunch of questions now that I'm ready to build a site. And sure enough, my plan doesn't exactly mesh with this "content-type-driven chapter" metaphor. For example: I want to have a 3 sections on my site - each one devoted to a different project. Each of these sections needs a file mgmt area, a calendar, a discussion forum and a news/story page. Can somebody suggest how I could achieve this using GL?

Does the three sections share the same users?

I haven't done this because I never needed this as yet, but based on my knowledge of GL, I would use the function of gl groups. Create 3 different groups and assign different topics to different group base on your purpose. You can then asign stories to different groups.

As for the filemgmt, Blaine is working on (I guess a premium plugin) to make use of the gl groups functions. It will be done in a week but he might choose to release to the public on his own timing. He would love to give it to you next week if you make some contribution to his hard work (note: I don't get any commission on that ). With that you will be able to assign different files to the three different groups.

As for the gl calendar. There were discussions about a hack a while back on the forum regarding group calendars. You might want to do a search here. Even without that hack, you can still assign different events to be viewable by different groups, by utilizing the gl groups function. That way you will have only one calendar, but each person will see different events on it based on which group s/he belongs to.

--------

Another option is to run three different gl sites on one core files. That is I think mentioned in the FAQ. You can also search this forum for the past discussion about this topic.

--------

It's true that GL is very powerful and quite adaptible.

Welcome on board!

Sam

Thanks for the suggestions. As for my area members, I expect that they'll have strong overlap, but I want to be able to restrict access to each area separately. I haven't fully explored the implementation of groups yet, so that looks like it might get me going with what I want. As for the filemgmt and calendar stuff - I can certainly wait. It's a non-profit site I'm working on for fun, and I can afford to be patient.

As to your other point about making donations, I am all for it. I used to run software companies, so I appreciate the effort that's gone into this stuff and will in the future. On the other hand, since it *IS* voluntary, I'm going to wait a few days to see if there's a feature I "really gotta have" so I can use my contribution as leverage.

But my real question was about how to organize the content, not the access. I am assuming that I need to create a static page for each "area" of my site, with links to the different area-specific features. And this gets back to the "chapter/index/pages" issue in my first post. If I create three different categories for the forums, and then go to the forums page, it shows me an index of all the topics in all the categories. Now, if I've restricted them to a specific group, I'm sure that the index page won't show me categories or topics that I don't have permission for. But if I have permission to the forums for group A and B, when I jump to the forum index I'll see the list for both groups. What I WANT is to have a separate index page for Group A topics and for Group B topics. Is there a way to do this easily, or am I going to have to write a bunch of low level stuff myself?

Jefficus

---

This has been an opinion, brought to you by the fine people at Jefficus World.

That's why I asked if the users will be the same.

Then you might need three gl sites with shared users. I remember those people that did it ran into problem with cookies. I don't remember how they resolve it. You might want to do a search.

You have a interesting need. Keep us informed what you have come up with.

BTW, the sites I build are also non-profit.

Sam