BPlan Construction - Update #1
After one week of planning and three days of programming, this is my first update of my progress so far with my new project: the Business Plan Competition.
My African Voice:
- Launched the blog and merged in content from my older blog
- Running Wordpress 2.7 --- haha, yuck!
- Throughout the next few weeks, I'll start consolidating my blogs and websites, routing everything through myafricanvoice.com and mtwesley.com
- Will also have time to add some content and posts to cover the last 2-3 years of my projects relating to entrepreneurship and West Africa and my study abroad in Ghana
Business Plan Competition:
- Launched the site
- Running Drupal 6.12
- The site is LOCKED at the server level; so don't bother to access it
- Set up user profiles using Content Profile, Automatic Nodetitles, CCK, and a bunch of CCK fields and widgets... see below
- Set up roles as account types: "Member", "Entrepreneur", and "Donor" using Auto Assign Role and Apply for Role. I may also end up using Role Change Notify... see below
How I set up user profiles:
- The user profile is a combination of "content profile" nodes; right now, they'll look like garbage on the user pages, but I'll write a TPL file for that and do all the pretty theming stuff later
- Created two node/content types: "Personal Information" and "Professional Information"
- Each use an assortment of CCK fields and widgets, such as Addresses, CCK Autocomplete, ImageField, and so forth to hold user information
- Used Automatic Nodetitles to generate a title for each node that is just the username of the user
- Some fields in "Personal Information" are required, and I have pushed those to the registration page
- Added an "Interests" field to the user profile, using a taxonomy called "Personal Interests" and associating it with one of the content profile nodes by using CCK Taxonomy
- Content Profile allows me to put the sub-tabs on the user page, which looks nice
- Enabled user pictures in the User Settings, which also can be themed to my heart's desires later on in this project lifecycle
How I set up account types:
- First, I obviously am using roles
- However, each role will end up being a content profile node type as well so that the user can edit information and (although I have not tried it yet) "add" a business project -- which will also be a node type -- by adding a node reference
- OK; let me say this more clear: someone with the Entrepreneur role can create an Entrepreneur profile (content type) and add as many Business Projects (content type) to it
- The modules I am using are meant to facilitate the process by allowing me to manage the sign up process for the Entrepreneur or Donor role and to make all users a Member by default
- To flush out the "role" concept, I also created a custom module that I will be referring to over and over again -- My African Voice module
- This module will be my way of "hacking" or moreover "hooking" into the Drupal modules that I am using to make them more site-specific
- In this instance, I am using my custom module to (1) hide a menu item created by the Apply for Role module because I want to display it in the same sub-menu location as the user profile categories are shown, that is, the same area where the content profile types are shown; and (2) to display that form in my own way using the words "account" instead of "role"
Issues:
- Addresses is really nice, but it works dumb right now in Drupal 6 when it comes to State/Provinces because most international provinces are better referred to by name instead of abbreviation; for example, "Ashante Region" instead of "AR" for Ghana.
- However, I understand the structure and read the issue queue, so I know that as soon as Heirarchial Select releases a good enough version for Drupal 6, that their will be nice select options
- I also played around with making it use AJAX and autocomplete, which worked; but I would rather wait for the real module's implementation to come out
- Experimented with a lot of donation modules lately; none really meet my satisfaction, well because there are none for Drupal 6 except LM Donate
- So, I am patiently waiting for all the Drupal 6 versions of the conferencing modules to come up: Signup, Donation, etc.
What can be done so far:
- Users can create accounts, making them "Members"
- Members can add personal and professional information about themselves
- Members can apply to be "Entrepreneurs" or "Donors"
- Administrators can control the application process
What comes next:
- BACKUP ALL MY DATA!!!
- Creating the Entrepreneur and Donor content profile node types and only allowing users with those roles to create that type
- Creating a Business Project node type and allowing only Entrepreneurs to create it (perhaps this will be changed)
More research needed:
- To understand Organic Groups, which I will use to create the "team" functionality
- To understand how OG and the Business Project nodes will interact and how to control access to certain fields in the business project
- To work on the Business Project structure; perhaps I will need other content types that go into the business project (not just groups) such as marketing and financial analysis
- To know when Signup and Donation and other modules I am waiting for will come out
- To understand the legal structure of my project
- To understand more about 501 (c) 3 organizations
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