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Open Atrium for Drupal - One Word Review

22 Jul 2009
geerlingguy

In one word: Awesome.

This Drupal distribution truly displays the beauty and power of Drupal—a dedicated team over at Development Seed spent a lot of time making a great Intranet-in-a-box solution built on top of Drupal, and even though it's a simple set of modules and an installation profile, you'd have to do a little digging to tell if an Open Atrium site even runs on Drupal!

Open Atrium Example Site

I've just been tinkering with it for a local nonprofit I help with, and I see a lot of potential. In less than 20 minutes (from the download of the tgz file), I had two groups, eight users, and a calendar/wiki/blog system running for everyone. It's drop-dead simple! If you're tasked with building an internal communications site, or a full-fledged Intranet, this is probably one of the easiest/best (and most free) solutions out there. Check it out!

Comments

Awesome

Awesome achievement indeed but I have to add that it cost me a few evenings. Firstly after downloading the tgz-file. I am fairly familiar with Drupal installs but the unpacked result (using WinZip) was an absolute mess and did not look familiar. After uploading it to my domain, all I got was a blank page.
Some googling later I discovered that the tgz-file is unreliable and I had a retry using the zip-file. This time everything went smooth. But why do they keep offering the tgz then?
However, first thing I tried after install was to enter a calendar event. All timezone settings pointing at Amterdam, I entered a new event: 30th July, end 30th July. No time entries possible, which is strange. Atrium produced a calendar entry for July 29th for no apparent reason.
So we are clearly in the beta stage here.

Hans van den Berk (not verified) | Jul 23rd, 2009 at 1:37 pm

Re: Awesome

Well, your first problem was using WinZip. If you were on a *nix based system, it would be a very simple task to extract the files.

Dunno what's up with the time zone stuff...I haven't had any issues with it.

And yes, it is indeed in beta. It even says so at openatrium.org.

:)

cweagans (not verified) | Jul 23rd, 2009 at 8:23 pm

It is too bad that you don't

It is too bad that you don't have time support yet... but that can be fixed *relatively* easy by going into Drupal admin mode and editing the views and such. Hopefully they'll make a new release soon, with some of these fundamental fixes.
It's still awesome, in my book, though :-)

Check out my personal website: www.lifeisaprayer.com.

geerlingguy | Jul 23rd, 2009 at 10:13 pm

WinZip

"Well, your first problem was using WinZip."

I saw that one coming but the fact is that I have been using this for ages. Also extracted thousands of tarballs from drupal.org and never had any problem whatsoever with it. Apparently I am not the only one reporting this issue, otherwise I could never have solved it myself :o)

Hans (not verified) | Jul 24th, 2009 at 4:31 am

lol @ Hans - well, I also use

lol @ Hans - well, I also use WinZip when I'm using a PC... but since I'm normally not on a PC to begin with...
Anyhow, I'm sure this kind of issue is just a small blip on the radar, and the zip/tar packaging will get better with time.

Check out my personal website: www.lifeisaprayer.com.

geerlingguy | Jul 24th, 2009 at 12:14 pm

Perfect...

Jeff, this is perfect for something I'm helping my wife with on her drupal site. I love anything that's open source... Thanks for the headsup! Cheers, Ed

Ed (not verified) | Sep 10th, 2009 at 10:01 pm

How?

If anyone knows how to do this, please post! I am a newbie at this and can't figure out how to modify the view for calendars so that adding an event also gives you the option to add fields for location and time. Another field for RSVP would be icing on the cake!

Val (not verified) | Oct 23rd, 2009 at 6:13 am

@ Val - please

@ Val - please see: https://community.openatrium.com/issues/node/127

Check out my personal website: www.lifeisaprayer.com.

geerlingguy | Oct 23rd, 2009 at 6:18 am

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