psi.ch Relaunch Review #1
The group module and complex customization
Situation
- The old psi.ch consists of ~180 "sub webs"
- Only members can edit and translate content and media
- Different languages per sub-web
- Different publishing workflows
- Each sub-web has admins
- Different navigation per sub-web
- Content snippets per sub-web (e.g. sidebar)
- Unpublished content and sub-webs only accessible to editors
Group module
- https://www.drupal.org/project/group
- At the center are groups
- Other entities are connected through relationship entities
- Supported by default: Nodes, Users (with roles & permissions)
- Separate module/patch: Media
- Own integration: Paragraph library items
Influenced by Sub-Web/Group
Multilingual customization
- Default: Groups can be translated
- Custom: Fields for default language and allowed languages
- Custom: Translate UI completely hidden for single-language groups, filtered when more than one
- Various patches for core and group necessary
Drupal core multilingual patches
- #2972308: Allow users to translate content they can edit
- #2978048: Unpublished translations should fallback to the original language
- #2971390: Disallow users to change content translation uid metadata field
- #2155787: Introduce more flexible access control for content translation operations
- #3002571: Multiple warning messages when having untranslatable fields
- #3007288: LanguageNegotiationUserAdmin requires 'access administration pages' which is too strict
- #2877994: Entity Links fields does not have translation support
Group patches
- #3030187: Node translations accessible for anonymous users
- #2984315: Media enabler
Alias & Breadcrumb
- Pathauto: /[node:group:fie....]/[node:prim...]
- New content is saved twice, prevent alias + redirect without group with custom alter hook
- Special case for "home page" per group
- Breadcrumb represents group hierarchy
- Requires patch for group tokens:
#2774827: Group tokens
Navigation & Operations
- Each Group has a referenced menu
- Custom menu block that fetches the menu from group, with fallback
- Members only: Custom operations block, with actions to create content and go to group overview/content list
Creating content
- Always happens in the context of a group
- Editors can not create global content
- Limited language selection and default
- Default language and group assignment also applied to media (created through entity browser)
- And paragraph library items
- Filters in entity browser to groups accessible to user
Views
- Primer: Placing article/node lists with list paragraph type (block_field)
- Primer: Controllable exposed filters and default values
- Custom: Active Group filter, only show articles of current Group
- With option to include articles from other Groups
- Challenge: Ajax requests for filters & paging
Various views limitations & bugs:
#2823541, #2866386
Authentication
- PSI provides SAML 2.0 IdP
- Integrated with SimpleSamlPHP
- Groups are not 1:1 match to organization structure:
- Each user is assigned to an organization unit number (e.g. 3102)
- Each group has N numbers assigned, with wildcard support: 3***
- Users are assigned to groups based on matching numbers
- Users become Sub-Web Admins through a role managed in LDAP/ActiveDirectory
Downsides
- Performance is challenging
- node access/grants, especially with users that are in many groups
- New content needs to be saved twice
- Data model is a bit overkill for our (current) use cases
- content is only a single group (exception: users)
- no relationship fields