A site administrator has asked the following question.
> If we looked at using a Drupal based web page/CMS for [our
> organisation], would we be able to integrate [an online group from
> our online groups site] into it reasonably easily?
This depends what you want to achieve. You could potentially run two
sites with similar presentation and main navigation that linked to each
other, like we have with WordPress for the OnlineGroups.Net blog.
http://blog.onlinegroups.net/
You could display web feeds from public OnlineGroups.Net groups on
Drupal pages, and probably achieve some other loose-ish links between
the two sites, to make them appear to be a single site. You could not
however enable users, or even site administrators to log into both sites
using a single identity.
You'd also have to weigh the cost of managing two different systems, as
well as trying to integrate them, against the cost of limiting yourself
to one or the other.
Depending on your requirements, there may be ways to enable you to
maintain a significant website using OnlineGroups.Net, as is the case in
the following examples.
Community Sector Taskforce
http://cst.org.nz/
APAPA
http://apapaonline.org
Playback Theatre
http://playback.onlinegroups.net/
Dataversity
http://dataversity.org.nz
These all require "behind-the-scenes" management, which needs a bit of
help from us, and a bit of a learning curve. Once you're there, though,
there is plenty of scope.
And, over the next few months, we plan to roll out the content
management interface that we've piloted on the "edit site introduction"
feature, to permit site-wide content-editing via the usual interface.
In the longer term, we certainly do plan to support integration with a
wide range of other systems.
