Request for ideas: private, restricted and public posts in a Drupal-based class blog
Posted by: Rob Wall in Drupal, education, weblogsI’m working with a teacher in the school who wants to give students a chance to do some authentic, self-directed writing (music to any edu-blogmeister’s ears, I’m sure). I’ve set up a site using Drupal. On the first day of student writing, we’ve already had some issues about appropriate levels of self-disclosure in the students’ writing.
What we would ideally like to do is to have the students be able to describe each blog entry as public, restricted or private. Public posts would be available for all the world to see (and I’ll have the link to the class blog up as soon as the teacher is a bit more comfortable with the process), restricted posts can only be seen by users who are logged in, and private entries can only be seen by the student and the teacher (who has the role of editor for the site). I have the taxonomy set up to describe all posts as such. I was working with the taxonomy access control module, but I have set it up so that private entries can’t even be seen by students.
So - am I on the right track? What do I need to do to get this happening?
BTW, I was originally thinking of just e-mailing some Drupal geeks I know and getting their answers, but I thought that some others might be having the same kinds of questions.
UPDATE - After a bit of experimentation (and much cursing) I’ve found that the node privacy byrole module seems to do the trick very nicely by allowing authors/editors to pick who can view (and also edit) the posts, and the interface and logic of the module is extremely elegant. Right now this module is only available for Drupal 4.6, but it looks like it will be upgraded/ported for Drupal 4.7. Thanks to D’Arcy and Harold for suggestions (and I will take a more serious look at Elgg in consideration of my next project).
Entries (RSS)
March 29th, 2006 at 12:18
I’m playing with the Organic Groups module to do this. It lets people create their own “groups”, manage who is in them, and then make content visible only to those people. It’s a bit non-intuitive in that Organic Groups are technically just nodes, so you go to Create Content > Group, but it works…
March 29th, 2006 at 12:39
I used to use Drupal for my own blog and now use WordPress, but I would recommend elgg.net for almost any educational setting, as it includes blogs, e-portfolios and social networking; all in one.
Your question would have been easy to answer with Elgg, as every post/object that is created can be marked as private, group members only, community members only, or public. You may want to consider Elgg for your next class …
March 29th, 2006 at 12:59
Hey D’Arcy - you were one of the Drupal geeks I had in mind. I’ve played around a bit with organic groups on a test install once. Does it provide the ability to make posts private?
Harold, I had given Elgg some very serious consideration. What I was concerned with was providing some sort of workflow to allow posts to be checked by the teacher before they went public instead of after they have gone live. The ability to make assign some levels of privacy is something that I think Elgg does very well. I’m also using profiles in Drupal to provide for some social networking based on interests of the students, which is also a very Elgg-like capability. We’re still early in the process, so I might just make the transition if some of the access control and publishing control issues that are needed in a secondary school can be managed.
March 30th, 2006 at 22:08
Oi - this is crazy. My previous comment was caught by Akismet!! How can I be logged in as the blog administrator and my comments get labelled as spam?
March 31st, 2006 at 09:11
Rob - if you set a post to not be “Public”, and select at least one Organic Group in the “Audience” section, then only those folks in the selected group(s) should be able to see it. Not as easy as the private/friends/public setting in Flickr or Elgg, but much more flexible as you can define any number of groups. I might be wrong about Elgg, though - it may offer multiple groups as well.
Also, I gave up on Akismet long ago. False positives/negatives etc… so I turfed it and reverted to Spam Karma 2, which rocks the Casbah.
March 31st, 2006 at 16:04
Multiple groups (communities, in Elgg-speak) are one of the strongest features in Elgg. Any user can create communities and control membership to be open, closed or require the creator’s approval.
March 31st, 2006 at 16:15
well there ya go… Elgg it is!
March 31st, 2006 at 16:19
Yeah - Elgg looks pretty good. But if I want to convince teachers and administrators, they want to have control over what students are posting (which is a fair requirement for content that is going on a school web site). There is an administrative account which can administer content, but it would be nice to have a more flexible roles and permissions system; Drupal absolutely kicks at that!
April 12th, 2006 at 08:51
Hi all,
I’m a bit late to the party, but a couple of points:
In addition to the communities functionality, Elgg does provide for access groups. For example, I’ve set a group called ‘development team’ which incorporates the core Elgg developers; I can then share files and blog posts with them but have them hidden from the rest of the world. We don’t need to set up a community to do this, and nobody need know I have this group.
Elgg is really easy to configure; a number of times we’ve been asked to remove the ‘public’ posting function from the access lists for all but administrators. This is very simple and allows for a free but publicly moderated community. I would argue very strongly against controlling what students post even within the school - a community is not a CMS, it’s a forum for discussion. Students are much less likely to post at all if everything needs to be individually approved, and doing so might turn into a full-time job.