Day 2

Hello again!

The authentication issue I talked about briefly yesterday really kind reared it's ugly head today. I know basically nothing about LDAP or ActiveDirectory, so this kind of left me in the dark. I'll have to contact an IT professional to maybe help me sort all that out.

Then came the CSS. There were a couple of minor issues I had with the default page layout, that needed to be fixed for my own sanity's sake, such as white text/links on an extremely light blue background. However, digging through about 1000 lines of CSS trying to pick out certain elements was proving to be pretty stressfull. That's when I discovered the web developer toolbar for Firefox. It comes with a bunch of handy features, but what helped me the most was the CSS information tool. It turns your mouse into a crosshair, allowing you to click on the element you wish to view CSS for, making it that much easier to find and change whatever is bugging you. (That feature can be found in CSS -> View Style Sheet Information)

Once I had that sorted, and my sanity maintained (for now), it was time to set up some temporary forums (which, looking back, I might have to take down...). I started by creating the base forums for each department, and creating some child forums for general questions and comments, to prevent my inbox and other forums from flooding with "Why don't we have feature x?". That, in itself, was just a module install (see my forum access module below) and a simple matter of setting up proper permissions. I'll have to save appointing moderators for when the authentication is set up.

From there, my day was spent trying to get a good idea of how I'm going to sort out the permissions issue for each department. After looking at various kinds of permissions, I finally decided to head for Organic Groups. It has a forums addon that should just about cover my needs. I'll just need to find another addon that will allow me to appoint forum moderators (my forum access module might do the trick...). This will allow me to keep the departments separate, and really sort of give each department their own space. Now all that's left is trying to figure out how to allow cross-group blog postings.

Up next tomorrow: possibly setting up a test server, trying to set up Organic Groups, and getting authentication going.

Until next post,

Tom.