Creating Groups?

BionicSquid

Is there a way (or is this planned) to create groups in Vanilla, without resorting to one of the non-reviewed plugins or fiddling with the Roles & Permissions features? I'm looking at creating a forum for a client and we need to have some segmentation in the forum. The problem with relying on Roles is that it's more difficult to manage roles across the platform, for this purpose, than to grant users the ability to join an individual group or a few groups. As for the plugins, I'd much rather stay with reviewed/approved plugins esp since I'm new to Vanilla.

vrijvlinder

There is no groups plugin, you can however create a "group" category which you could control via permissions. You could make the person who started the group a moderator for that particular group.

DirtyDog

Groups is a feature that IMO has not been effectively integrated into any forum platform that I know of. Can you explain what features you would like to see in groups and how they interact with the regular forum?

BionicSquid

Thanks for these thoughts.

We've used BuddyPress in the past, and that has the option to have distinct groups each with their own forum or to have groups with no separate forum but rather a central forum which group members can post to. Now I realize BuddyPress is not itself a forum but rather can contain forums, and is set up to do more than a forum alone does. However it does implement the Groups feature pretty well. The reason I'm looking to implement something other than BuddyPress for this project is due to its lack of integration with Tapatalk/ForumRunner.

What we're looking to do is to have, for example, users with shared interests belong to groups - not a single group but multiple - some of which would be visible but restricted as to membership, and others of which would actually be invisible to non-members. Using some of the workarounds that have been mentioned here and in other threads seems to require a lot of juggling that seems prohibitive when it comes to having multiple users joining multiple restricted groups.

DirtyDog

So a group is just a set of forum discussions only for the members of that group? Anything else?

BionicSquid

I think that would be a great start. If we're talking about expanding beyond the context of a forum, it would also be helpful to have users post documents and chat with each other but within a group for privacy purposes.

DirtyDog

I don't really know what would be best but my thoughts have been that a group should have some kind of description page that describes the group and maybe lists who the members and leaders are. And of course a list of discussions. It could look something like the addons pages here at Vanilla.

BionicSquid

@DirtyDog yes, agreed. Though even that listing should be subject to the privacy settings of the group. So for example the membership list should only be visible to approved members if that setting is desired. I'm sure there are more features a group would have too, but maybe I'm trying to make Vanilla into BuddyPress....

Gabriell

There should definitely be a Group plugin, most helpful to INTRANET type sites, or even private discussion boards based on different types of memberships.
I know the features of BuddyPress well, but the grouping could be applied here in the same way roles&permissions are, but making the whole "what displays to whom" more easier when people are automatically inserted into groups without having to build different type of roles for each category. (most people like their member title displayed as well, so in this way there won't be only "Member" but "Group X Member")