Organic Groups configuration is not for the faint of heart. There are many different elements related to a site's content, and OG touches pretty much all of them.

The development of an Organic Groups system is not something that an average OSU Drupal user will encounter.  Due to the complexity of the system, Digital Experience has preconfigured OG for use within our community.

The following section is provided as a courtesy to other Drupal organizations that are considering setting up Organic Groups for their own purposes.  As with any advanced element in Drupal, there is definitely more than one way to develop a system.  What is provided is how we've done it to suit our very large and diverse web community.

Before Diving In...

You will need to have a role on the Drupal site that allows you to enable modules, set permissions, and work with custom content types. User 1 is the best account to have for this because it has unlimited access. If you don't have User 1 access, make sure that you're given the proper role to do the job.

You will really want to have some things planned out in advance.  Think of your Drupal site as a house, and Organic Groups as the foundation.  Trying to build a foundation after building the house isn't very logical - and while it can be done, doing so requires a lot more effort than if you just do it properly from the outset.

Some things you'll want to sketch out in advance are:

  • The structural mode of your group
  • The different roles and permissions you want involved in your groups
  • The content types you will want to keep solely for group use and the ones you want to keep for general use
  • A logical URL structure