Organic Groups sittin in an ELMS Tree..

K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

I've been very negative about usage of Organic Groups in the past.  ELMS started being built in organic groups in 2007 only to be declared a total failure because of how immature Drupal 5 (and organic groups 5.x) were.  This drove us to use a purely multi-site based approach to site structuring and completely scare me away from infrastructures involving Organic Groups.

Fortunately, a lot has changed since our journey began back in 2007:

• Drupal and Organic Groups have drastically matured as platforms
• Community support for Organic Groups via helper modules and distributions built off of it have helped push the notion of OG far beyond just the idea of "that thing that powers groups.drupal.org"
• Our Unit has matured in our thinking about instructional design as well as how technology can help augment instructional design
• I'm much more active in the community and we've benefited immensely in terms of bouncing ideas off of colleagues and other project leads
• The Outline Designer (v 1.2+), backbone of our course development, has support for Organic Groups (6.x)

 All of these things have lead to today's announcement:  ELMS Alpha 2 has been released, running fully off of organic groups.  What does that mean for people that have been interested in ELMS in the past?  The requirement for installing ELMS is stated like this: "Can you install Drupal? good to go!".

Groups in organic groups have been mapped to Courses thanks to some renaming of views, string over-rides module (critical for UX) and a helper module specific to the distribution.

While we still are running a multi-site based stack for our current course infrastructure, we'll be bringing up a modified version of the ELMS distribution on a new machine in the future and chugging ahead, fully in-love with Organic Groups and we think you will too!  Click through to download ELMS Alpa 2 today! Then watch the installation tutorial below!