Building The Site

I've added a quick feature to articles and projects to support attaching files. It currently only supports .txt and .pdf files, but it's easy to add more file-types in the future. Attachments will automatically be listed below the article and can be directly linked from the article if the Full HTML text filter is used.

User accounts now have a new field called "Real Name." This is where you can define how you want your name to appear on articles, and comments. Your login name might be your callsign, but you may want your full name to appear on posts. If left blank it will default to your user name.

To set this up, you need to install the realnames module, which requires the token module. I left the default permissions for both. I had to add a new field to the user object and used tokens to define how the site will display real names to reference that new field.

While experimenting with the People content-type, I noticed that everyone could view the record. That's not what I want. I only want authenticated users viewing People. Otherwise I can't expect users to be open and honest. We have to protect that information from un-vetted eyes. This is why we have the invitation-based, and physically authenticated approach to user accounts.

Two of the data-structures that we will manage are People and Organizations. People may or may not be actual users of the site, so we'll want to keep them separate. However it would be nice to link each user account to a People record. Mainly we want a People (or should I call it Person?) record to have a Name, a set of contact methods, and track membership in Organizations. I'd like to track the county that they live/operate in primarily. We'd also like to track their Amateur Radio call-sign and class.

Today I created a new simple content type called "Project." It's not much different than "Basic Page," but it supports tagging (and shares the tag list with Articles) and comments. I updated the permissions for the contributor role so that they can create new project pages and edit their own pages. I removed permissions to do this with basic pages because those are reserved for special purpose pages. The first limitation that I see is that it's not easy to upload and include pictures for the projects, and I want them to have a lot of pictures.