This book will walk through all the steps required for setting up a basic intranet built on Open Atrium. We review real world examples and provide resources for additional information along the way. Each chapter will address a specific section or feature of Open Atrium and will include information on how you can implement that piece in your own intranet. While this book will cover setting up and configuring Open Atrium, it will not cover developing your own features.
Chapter 1, Overview of Open Atrium, covers what Drupal is and how Open Atrium works with Drupal to provide a foundation for building your intranet. It will provide an overview of the intranet features included with Open Atrium and will discuss what types of entities can benefit from using Open Atrium.
Chapter 2, Setting up a Web Server, looks at the different options for setting up a web server to install Open Atrium. These options include setting up a web server locally on your computer or hosting your website with a web hosting provider. If you already have a web server set up, then you should skip ahead to Chapter 3, Installation.
Chapter 3, Installation, provides examples and go through the Open Atrium installation one step at a time. We will start by creating a database, downloading Open Atrium, and finally installing and configuring Open Atrium.
Chapter 4, User Administration, walks through the process of setting up new users, creating accounts, and managing roles. In addition, we will look at the member directory, and setting up user profiles, including how to upload a users avatar or picture.
Chapter 5, Dashboard, provides an explanation of one of the key components of Open Atrium. In this chapter, we will look at creating separate dashboards or home pages for each of your departments or groups. The dashboard allows recent activity items, events, and other items, including blog posts to be brought forward to a central point for each department.
Chapter 6, Groups, provides information about groups, which are individual areas of your site that can be created for your workgroups or departments. Each group can be set to either private or public groups with members. Private groups only expose content to the individual members of that group, while public groups expose any content created by member to all users of an organization.
Chapter 7, Document Library, looks at creating an employee manual that contains several sections. The Document Library feature allows us to maintain a hierarchy of documents, so that items, such as Manuals can be organized and ordered in a manner that makes sense for your organization.
Chapter 8, Blogs, explains another great feature of Open Atrium, which includes a function for blogging. This allows your users to write blog posts that can include references to other items in Open Atrium, including documents, events, or cases. Examples will be provided for creating and editing a blog post and referencing other areas of our site.
Chapter 9, Case Tracker, looks at the Case Tracker feature in Open Atrium. The Case Tracker is versatile in that it can be used as an issue tracker, suggestion box, or a place to submit questions. The Case Tracker divides types of cases up by project and each case can have a priority, status, and case type. The Case Tracker feature assigns a number to each case and maintains a history of commenting and status changes along the way.
Chapter 10, Calendar, provides the necessary information about using the calendar feature in Open Atrium. The calendar feature provides a way to create company events and pull in calendar items from iCal feeds, which are items from an external calendar. An example of an iCal feed would be a list of holidays. Once this feed is pulled in then all the holidays will be listed on your calendar. In this chapter, we will walk through the examples of creating new events and pulling an external calendar.
Chapter 11, Customization, guides you through the process of customizing your Open Atrium. For the most part, Open Atrium will serve your needs with the basic installation. However, there may be times where you want to tweak some of the settings either to match your company's terminology, or change how or what is displayed to the user. This chapter goes through the steps required to alter the Case Tracker types, statuses, and priorities. We will look at customizing Open Atrium views to customize specific items. Lastly, we will look at how to customize the site information, including the site name and footer.
Chapter 12, Open Atrium and Drupal Maintenance, explains the ways by which we can keep our website stable and running. This chapter provides the necessary tools you need to keep your site healthy and running. We will discuss the following:
Routine maintenance activities
Performance and caching
Applying site updates
This chapter will teach you how to maintain your site and review reports to ensure that any questionable issues are addressed prior to it becoming a problem.
Appendix A, Resources, provides additional links on topics discussed through out the book to serve as a reference point for additional information. In this section, we will cover a number of links and documents on the Drupal.org site that are helpful for understanding more how Drupal works.
Appendix B, Features & Theming, goes over a key module of Open Atrium named Features. Features allow custom snippets of code to be shared among the community, so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel each time we want to add a new feature to our site. Here we introduce you to features and then provide references to find out more information about consuming and developing features for your site. We may also want to customize our sites look and feel and will provide information on where to go to create a new "theme" for our site.
For this book, you will need access to the internet. Links will be provided if you are setting up your own web server on where to go to download the web server software and the Open Atrium distribution. All of the software required to follow along and install Open Atrium is considered open source and available as free downloads. You will also need a web browser to follow the examples. If you are setting a web server or hosting your site with a web hosting provider, you will want to review the system requirements at the beginning of Chapter 2.
This book is intended for beginners to intermediate computer users who have not worked with Drupal before or want to expand their Drupal knowledge by installing Open Atrium. If you want to learn how to quickly set up an intranet to improve your organization's communication and workflow, then this book is for you.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The first two lines in the preceding example copy the default settings file for your site to settings.php for use by Drupal using the cp (copy) command."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
cd /Applications/MAMP/htdocs <enter> cp ./sites/default/default.settings.php ./sites/default/settings.php <enter> chmod 777 ./sites/default/settings.php <enter> chmod 777 ./sites/default <enter>
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: " Once we have filled out the database name and clicked on Create, a message will be displayed under the navigation for phpMyAdmin that says Database openatrium has been created."
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to< [email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.
If there is a book that you need and would like to see us publish, please send us a note in the SUGGEST A TITLE form on www.packtpub.com or e-mail< [email protected]>.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books maybe a mistake in the text or the code we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the errata submission form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded on our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works, in any form, on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at< [email protected]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
You can contact us at< [email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.