Upcoming features for Organic Groups - sponsor me

I often am asked about which features I plan to add to Organic Groups module. Here is a list of major features that are on my list.

I'm looking for sponsors to pay me (or another person if that makes sense) to implement these features. These are non trivial features; I expect each sponsorship to cots approximately US$5000. Please do contact me if you are interested. I will credit you on the OG module page, in the README file, and on my personal blog. The community will thank you greatly.

In no particular order ...

Panels2 integration and flexible group homepage(s)

See issue. In order to customize the group home page, you currently have to theme it or you can swap in any custom View for the one that og provides. I want to leap light years ahead and let group admins create as many flexible group pages as they wish. The pages can have a layout of their choice (including grou specific CSS), and content of their choice. All this will be powered by Panels module. And admins will be able to name one of those pages as their group homepage. This greatly improves the ability of group admins to design their own mini website thats tailored to their needs.

Notifications Framework integration for emails.

See issue. OG has a nice solution today for email notifications. Its flaw is that it is isolated from other subscriptions that a user might want on a site. For example, on groups.drupal.org a user might want to opt out of job related notifications in his favorite group. There is currently no way to do that. Similarly, a user might want to subscribe to a tag and still avoid double notification if that tag is used in his group. The new notifications framework by Develpment Seed should meet these tricky needs. Notifications has basic OG support today. I want to expand that support, and then rip the existing functionality out of OG.

More granular admin preferences

See issue. OG has loads of admin preferences but it also has very many use cases and admins are clamoring for more. Specifically, there is a lot of demand for preferences which vary by group, vary by content type, or site-wide. For example, an admin might want his geographical groups to always be public but might let his event planning groups choose private as needed. The challenge here is to build a clean UI which let admins define how broadly they want a preference to apply and then let them set the corresponding value. This UI problem is holding back lots of nice progress like letting making wiki style groups where all subscribers can edit all posts.

Port to Drupal 6

I'm really excited about Drupal6, and want OG to be ready ASAP. I hope to start porting once Views issues an alpha release. I want to pay close attention to the themeing improvements in D6 so OG continues to be a model citizen. Expect the group details block to change into a standard menu system block and expect a much better solution for authenticated rss feeds (e.g. all posts in my groups, posts from private groups, ...).

Externally defined subscription lists

See issue. A long standing request is for certain groups to have their membership defined outside of OG. That could be in the user profile system (e.g. all users from Belgium), or even in a 3rd party database such as all users in a given CiviCRM grouping.

Improved experience for group invitations

See issue. OG does not currently keep track of the invitatons it sends which is a bit annoying when admin sends invitations out to non members for his moderated group. Once those members sign up for the site and subscribe, the admin has to approve the request. There are other scenarios where invitations need workflow help.

Integrate nodequeue for group specific sticky, promoted, etc.

Right now, a post is sticky or promoted everywhere. It would be nice to make these group specific properties. I think this can be done cleanly with smartqueues in the new nodequeue module. Needs some research and code.