Grayside.Org

One of the little conundrums in OpenAtrium (and I imagine in Spaces) is building static content for the space. (Or in OpenAtrium terms, getting a nice dashboard box to stay put, yet be customizable by group.)

There are countless ways of doing this, but I opted to create a CCK Textarea field in my group content type (named field_group_welcome_message) and turn on the PHP filter.

Then I created a Box (which is what OpenAtrium uses, could just as well have been a block) using the following snippet:

Previously, I discussed how you could move CCK fields into the node form sidebar by careful fieldgroup naming.

If you are of a programmer's bent, you might instead try the more flexible programmer's solution--preprocessor function. I dug this out of the atrium_blog feature.

Do you like the large gray "Add Blog entry" button when you first visit your blog space, and have yet to create anything? Creating views with similar buttons (or adding more) is really easy!

The key is to create Empty text in your view using the Full HTML Input Format. Then, drop some HTML in like this to make use of Atrium's built-in theming.

You might wonder how cases are considered "closed" for purposes of case filtering in the Case Tracker. It's an attempt to be helpful on the Case Tracker's part– hide the stuff that is no longer relevant unless the user specifically asks for it. Unfortunately, I don't like the defaults on what it considers irrelevant.

OpenAtrium has some pretty slick styling of it's node add/edit form. Unfortunately, when you add a CCK field to it, you get something comparatively under-styled and in the main column of the form.

If you want to get that slick styling and move the CCK fields to the right, try the following:

1. Go to admin/build/modules and enable the Fieldgroup module under CCK.
2. Go to the Manage Fields page for your content type. Create a new group, the machine name starting as group_sidebar.