With my organizer request finally approved, I intend on doing a bit of re-organizing and cleanup within the Sports Club (League) Management group over the next couple of weeks. I wanted to take a moment to provide a heads up regarding those plans, and offer group members a chance to provide their own input, suggestions, and feedback.
Structure
I took a quick look through the group history, and it appears that most posts fall into one of the following categories:
- Discussion & Announcements regarding existing 'league-related' Contrib modules
- "How should I ..." advice requests and questions
- Posts discussing potential implementation options which could be leveraged in not-yet-created modules
As such, I plan on breaking the site into three sections, which will be represented as individual 'tabs' at the top of the page. One of these tabs will be dedicated to the 'existing' league modules, and will contain listings and details regarding existing contrib modules available for Drupal 6 and 7. The second page will be dedicated to 'future-looking' discussions, and more specifically a 'One League API' iniative that I intend on spearheading through this group. The third (and main) page will continue to be a generic discussion forum, for questions and postings which don't fit into the other two tabs.
Taxonomy
To facilitate the above changes, I will be modifying the 'categories' used within the group; restructuring the taxonomy to more closely mirror the above structure. The new category will be key in ensuring that content is included in the appropriate pages. While I don't think I can remove the existing 'Club type' and 'Sport' categories, I may deprecate their use for the time being. (With only 5 posts actually using the terms, I don't anticipate this causing anyone any serious concerns.)
Layout
As part of the re-organization, I will be updating the look and feel of the group pages, moving away from the default 'list of posts' view and more towards a 'grouping of like posts' panel display.
One League API
As mentioned, I intend on leveraging a section of this group as the home for my "One League API" initiative over the next number of months ... helping to address a key component of the original mission statement for this group (ie. "creating a set of modules or installation profile to facilitate sports club (league) websites").
While I initially envisioned my Ultimate League Tool module as a full-featured solution for league management, I recognize that I made a few key architectural decisions early on which limit the ability to leverage ULT in partnership with other league modules. To this end, I intend on starting fresh with Drupal 7, working towards defining a common League data structure, defining and providing the base entity/node/field objects which collectively make up the various aspects of a league ... with the hope that other league module maintainers will adopt the same structure and use it as a base for their own modules. Having a common data definition and supporting API will help further the evolution of league related modules in the Drupal contrib space, and enhance future interworking of related modules ... instead of having multiple large modules (such as ULT and LeagueSite) with complementary feature sets but no way of leveraging individual features from both modules on a single website.
Thoughts? Opinions? Have I missed anything? What would you like to see from this group in the future?
