Hello everybody,

I have discovered Xoops 3 days ago and I have been spending quite a few hours reading the manuals in order to prepare for the actual building of my site. I find everything to be very clear and simple so far, so good job on the documentation.

I haven't played with the Xoops more than just installing it, so I may be asking questions that are obvious in the actual installation but not as obvious to me in the manuals.

I have 2 questions concerning Groups.


Let's say that I want to make a site for people who like different types of food. So I have two groups: Soup, and Stake. Users will join the group depending on what they like more in order to read either news about soup or about stake. But if one user likes both just as much, than that user will want to belong to the 2 groups in order to read the news about both, and I want to allow it.

In the documentation it is written clearly that belonging to more than 1 group is not recommended, and I can probably understand why.

Q. 1
Is there a "best practice" if I want to allow it, in order to avoid conflicts?

Q. 2
Can I allow the users to select by themselves the groups that they want to join or quit, for example when editing their profile and checking a Soup or/and Stake check box under preferences?

Thank you for your patience in reading this and for any advice that you may have.

Dan

You can probably accomplish it with the Group Manager

But why then such a strict recommendation in the manuals?

I realize that I can probably organize the groups the way I want, but my point is to try to avoid as many conflicts as possible straight from the beginning.

I read about Group Manager, though I am still not aware about all of its functions, and will start actually using the whole software today in order to learn more about it, so I am just trying to be as prepared as possible.

Thank you.
Dan

In Xoops, 'groups' are used more for access control than separation of interests, so I'm not sure if they will meet your requirements.

The 'Anonymous' group covers all anonymous site visitors. When someone registers, they are automatically added to the 'Registered Users' group. The site administrator can also create a custom group, e.g. 'Publishers' and can then copy registered members into that group. (the user can safely remain in the registered members group too).

Many modules allow you to specify which groups are able to use particular features. For example, you could hide the 'News' module from the anonymous group, show news to the 'Registered Users' group and allow members of the 'Publishers' group to post news articles.

Normally, only the webmaster has access to the 'groups' admin controls and you wouldn't want to give full control of it to anyone else. However, Kaotiks excellent 'Groups' module allows you to give control of group membership to members of a specified group.

For example, you could create a group called 'Executives' and add your business associates to it. In Kaotiks module, you could then give the Executives group permission to move registered users in and out of other groups.

I wrote some info on how to do this in this post.

This 'second-tier' of user control is great if you build Xoops sites for clients, because you can give your clients user controls without giving them webmaster level access.

There may be a module somewhere that does it, but the ability for users to register themselves into a specific group when they join as you suggest is not currently possible AFAIK.

It is very clear what you have answered, many thanks for your time. I completely understand how I must think the structure of my site.

Maybe I will start to look into module making later :)

Best regards,
Dan

I will be looking at making some upgrades to the groups in the near future so I am curious if there is anything specifically that would be desired.

The group manager is a nice module but it stopped working for me with 2.5.1a and I never went back and tried it again.

I was considering incorporating it into my "hack"...

Currently I am really only looking to add group based themeing and subscription based support. I am hoping that by doing this now it will be incorporated into 2.6 in the future.

This is next on my list after the install script...

To be honest, the only thing that I can think of right now is to implement a means for users to be able to join or quit certain groups at will, without the need for moderator input.

I can see this as a useful feature in quite a number of circumstances.

Regards,
Dan

Quote:

https://xoops.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=71098&forum=20&post_id=325607#forumpost325607

I develop company intranet site. It's with 200-250 users. It's not so much. However, have created almost 60 groups to meet many specific modules and specific demands. Ones for users in selected professional positions, another for a whole departments and some for mix both. So Group Manager module is helpful. (Standard permissions form can produce hundreds of checkboxes in certain cases, so it stops working... but XoopsGroupPermForm it's another topic).
Well, it will be nice to see grouping groups like phpGACL library. But probably something like that would be too complicated and unnecessary for the vast majority of use cases.
http://phpgacl.sourceforge.net/

Ok, I will go to those links and look.

Was also thinking it might be good to add user based permission over rides so we don't need to incorporate new groups for minor permissions.
I think its crazy to need a group to give someone 1 permission...

Will comment further on the other thread.