I'm in need of an ability to allow users to self-associate with other users.

A user who knows the username/password for another user, can establish the relationship. The associate can always undo the association. I only need a single grouping, so once you are associated you cannot join another grouping, unless you undo the original association.

Users can either be not associated (default) or associated. Users who are associated with themselves are the leader of other users associated with them.

I've done the database side of things by extending the xoopx_user table with a single field.

There are only two interfaces that I need to do initially: the undo association and the username/password form to establish the association.

I'm looking for recommendations on where would be the wisest place to extend the interface on a code/long term support position. This is something I need for a particular site and will be a long term hack for me.

Should I just create my own file mimicing edituser.php or extend edituser.php?

For those who are interested, the path I decided on was to extend the kernel/user.php to include my new field, and then adjust userinfo.php to add a button for my interface, and edituser.php to code my screens and update routines.

Not sure what you mean with "association"

But what you did will be so much easier in XOOPS 2.1, where the addition of a new user field, the editing in edit user and more can be done dynamically.

Can you expand on what you use those associations for?

We ended up going another direction, where users can create users in a table outside of XOOPS for a different purpose (outside application that wanted to know about association). The site was only a way of purchasers of the software to group themselves.

However the concept was, users would register, then would associate with other users to form a group. So members from a company would each register their own user, then associate with one person who would be the leader (usually the one who purchased our software for the company). The website was just a new portal for the software.

It could have been done with a group hack, that would allow users to create/join/manage their own groupings. Not sure which makes more/less sense, but we went an entirely different direction either way.

I'm looking forward to the next xoops, you guys do great work. Hopefully I'll be less busy in the future, so I can offer some hand/eyes, just heavily over scheduled at the moment.

In XOOPS admin create groups not the registered users.
How about to let registered users create group(Yahoo style..) and invite others to join. This could be an addition to your project.