Thread

I am building a site and running into an organizational question.  The site functions as a teaching tool where students log in and are redirected to their registered class. Each class has 40 students who will work in teams of 5. Once they are at the class page they see the topics covered within the class, outside links to resources and blog post titles from members within the class organized as Class posts grouped by team, My Team posts and My Posts.  Students use a safecracker/wygwam form to create/edit posts without going to the cp. 

Current path:  1 Channel with each Class as a category and teams determined by a self assigned custom profile field dropdown. I can show the logged in students own post titles and link to the single entry, and I can show the students team post titles and link to the single entry but what I am having a hardtime doing is linking to a page showing all the posts of a specific team.   

Maybe there is a better method by making the teams as sub categories of a class? 

Option1) Continue with 1 channel and class categories but create sub categories with the team name under each class.

1 Class channel with categories and subcategories
            Biopharm category
                Team1 subcategory
                Team2 subcategory
                Team3 subcategory
            Drug Design category
                Team1 subcategory
                Team2 subcategory
                Team3 subcategory

Option2) 1 Channel per class with teams as categories.  This seams like a lot of unnecessary work for each new class added.

Biopharmaceutics Channel with Team1 Team2 Team3 etc categories
Drug Design Channel with Team1 Team2 Team3 etc categories            

Have I completely missed something? Is there a better way of doing this?

Hi botkiller,

Welcome to the forums 😊

What kind of URL structure are you after?

A team is made of of people so I would treat them as member groups.

Am I right in saying that each team in each of the classes are made up of the same group of people?
Can a student be in one class and not another?

What channels do you have currently?

Your second option sounds viable to me but use memebr groups instead of categories. That depends on your team structure and the questions I asked above though.

Hi John,

URL structure: Anything that works 😊 but I think this structure would be nice.
                          /workshops/2011_XYZUniv_SBDD (SBDD=Structure Based Drug Design)
                          /workshops/2011_XYZUniv_SBDD/team"N”
                          /workshops/2011_XYZUniv_SBDD/team"N”/posts
                          /workshops/2011_XYZUniv_SBDD/team"N”/files_images
                          /workshops/2011_XYZUniv_SBDD/team"N”/{username}/posts
                          //workshops/2011_XYZUniv_SBDD/team"N”/{username}files_images

Right so the students are from a land far away, they travel as a group of 40 to me or I travel to them and then after the class I don’t see them again. This is something that could change, the program is in its infancy.  Ultimately we want students to take multiple classes over the years.  This was my first problem.  I created a member group called 2011XYZunivSBDD for a single class.  If a student ever is involved with a different class, they will need to be either moved to the new member group and lose previous member group privs or put into a superstudent member group with privs to both classes.  I was going to cross that bridge then.  Class separation is important as we would like to not give away any content from other classes.

The classes we teach are custom for each group of students yet frequently have overlapping content between classes.  For example, we are teaching a class on computational drug design. This class will have a discussion on molecular docking.  That same molecular docking discussion will be used within another class with a different group of students who want to learn about computational chemistry.

While they are in the class, they are “randomly” grouped into teams for working through the material as we use a case study format for teaching.  While in their teams they will create content and this will be presented as a team at the end of the class.  I want the teams to be able to upload/download files and images and create blog posts documenting their work along the way.  I am using a safecracker Wygwam field for the student “blog” posts and for uploading files and images to the server.

I have the following channels,  Topics, Links, and Files with entries created by the course coodinator, each with a category group containing the different class names. This material is presented to the students when they go to the workshop/category/classname page.  Then a separate Teams channel containing the student posts with entries created using the safecracker field mentioned above.  I would like them to see these entries (as title links) organized by team and author on the same workshop page.

Any ideas you have are much appreciated.

Just a few thoughts on having read through this.

- This sort of case requirements are where the nascent Ellis Enterprise abilities ought to become interested. I’ll pulse someone to help see that becomes possible.

- As well, it is a How To, and lacking an Enterprise Patterns forum as yet defined, support may be moving it to Community Help soon enough.

- I would be very careful not to design URLs with quote marks in them - not done and will break things on the web, before likely breaking EE. For aesthetic and user and across-languages reasons, I’d use friendlier terms than abstract acronyms also.

- although I appreciate John Henry’s initial instinct for using Member Groups, according to your added information I think this will not suit your depth of intent. You want flexibility, large numbers of teams, long term and potentially extended use, and team-to-team visibility control. Also, if you used Member Groups, you would have to update every one of them individually for any general membership policy changes.

- I’d personally tend away from categories also, partly out of preference which may be unsupported, but much more out of a sense for the evident complexity of your desires, especially their further growth likely as the real application unfolds.

- the overall pattern, without getting into details but attending to them, is that you have a pretty general business-application-like wish for a lot of flexibly connected items. This points to requiring a real relational database design as framework, which you can accomplish with EE fields and channels and relations, and as many plugins like Playa that may be appropriate (or not) to make certain application adminstration tasks more visibly accomplished and/or easier.

- My impression is that you can do most of what you wish in such ways, and that it would be a good idea to get some experienced help in laying it out as well as implementing. I.e., EE professional with strong non-EE business/relational application skills as well.

- The place where I’m feeling there may be some holes is in cross-team and -member security in the area of member-uploaded files and image materials, and their proposed monetarily sandboxed uses in shared blogs and other presentations. Something in the way of a commercial or custom add-on, or possibly some way to use SafeCracker should be able to solve it. I think this again points to gaining a suitable EE professional partner or more for you.

I think many would be interested in how this turns out over development, so I hope you’ll keep us updated as you progress.

Regards,
Clive

Thank you for your thoughts Clive.  As a quick follow-up, the quotes will not actually be in the url, I was trying to show that N is some group number and not the literal N.

Hi, botkiller -

Unfortunately, this kind of infrastructure setup question goes a bit more into consulting and away from the support that we can offer here in the forums.  I’ll shift this down to Community Help in case others have some input.

If you do need some more help with this, folks on the Pro Network might be able to help you come up with a scalable structure for your site.