Comment by davi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davi | Hacker News Reader

I did some looking around a while ago and couldn't find anything that gracefully gives users ACL-like, fine-grained control over who can see which of their postings. This seems like a clear hole in the space, too me.

I'd like to be able to create a group of users -- let's say by email address, so they wouldn't even have to be registered with the site at the time I created the content -- and then be able to post specifically to that group.

Drupal Organic Groups gets close, but sort of misses the mark -- I don't want people to have join a group, I just want them to see content I've targeted to them when they come to my page on this hypothetical site. Also Drupal's permissions system seems sort of disjointed -- various plugins can too easily collide with each other's customized permissions schemes. (Caveat: this based on reading, not implementation, so maybe it can be done.)

Also -- I want this to be something I can run on a server I own. I don't want to put content I care about in the cloud.

This idea has been kicking around in my head for a long time now. If anyone knows of a CMS that lets you do this, I'd be interested. Someday (like when I've finished with grad school?) maybe I'll scratch this itch...

It just so happens that I just finished building a Drupal system that stores content until a user with a particular email address logs into a site, then shows it to them.

Why don't you want the users to join an Organic Group? They don't have to explicitly join: you can have it happen invisibly at signup time. You can write code that intercepts the user as they register (or, better, just after they click an emailed link to confirm their email address), notices that their email is on a list of "users that should be added to group X when they show up", and adds them to the group. Then it's just an, um, "simple" matter of using the permissions system. (Which can, indeed, be a little hairy. But not so hairy that lots of people haven't used it.)

Of course, like so many Drupal problems, this will require some custom code...

"I just finished building a Drupal system that stores content until a user with a particular email address logs into a site, then shows it to them."

Interesting -- public code?

"like so many Drupal problems, this will require some custom code"

Yep -- that's what I mean, it's an itch to scratch, not a tool I can deploy today. I wish I could deploy such a tool; it would be useful w/ my graduate work, which involves lots of collaboration w/ different groups.

It sounds like you're a heavy Drupal developer, and so your comment gives me some hope that if I were to try to implement this with Drupal, I wouldn't end up in a stinking morass. (At least not one I didn't make myself.)

your comment gives me some hope that if I were to try to implement this with Drupal, I wouldn't end up in a stinking morass.

Oh, no, Drupal pregenerates the stinking morass for you. ;)

Well, it's not really as bad as that. But the person in this thread who pointed out that Drupal development is the art of compromise was on the money. And the learning curve for Drupal 5 can be rather like scaling a sheer cliff. It all depends on what you're trying to do, though. If you're willing to compromise your goals to fit the scope of things that you can convince Drupal to do right out of the box... it works out of the box!

Get a book or two. The Lullabot.com folks seem to be good teachers. In particular, if you find yourself wanting to write PHP for Drupal, get a copy of Pro Drupal Development and sleep with it under your pillow.

As it happens, my email thing is not public code. But perhaps it could be. I seem to have already identified one potential user! But the stuff I wrote would have to be factored out and turned into a plugin for Organic Groups, or perhaps interfaced with the Actions Module.

I dusted off my previous experiments with Drupal and started messing around. I pretty quickly ran into barriers with the 'out of the box' snap together model, but I see what you mean, the infrastructure could work with some customization.

But, the 'stinking morass' thing gets to me -- maybe better to start closer to scratch w/ e.g. Rails or Django? Why did you decide to go the 'customize Drupal' route?

(for my own notekeeping: brought this idea up again, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466673)

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