Social Groups 2.0 Dev Update II: Forums and Ranks

Since the release of Social Groups 1.0 one obvious limitation has been the restriction of group discussions to a single forum. This constraint prevented both small and large communities alike from creating restricted access forums afforded to only certain group members such as staff forums. In more elaborate communities the lack of multiple forums prevented widespread use of the Social Groups application.

Another issue that restricted larger and more complex communities from thriving in the Social Group environment was the limited number of user ranks. In Social Groups 1.0 there were only four ranks which could be defined and used within a group: guest, member, moderator, and admin. These ranks worked well enough for simple groups that did not need to differentiate their member base but for clans or other groups which tended to have complex hierarchies it was a crippling restriction.

With the release of Social Groups 2.0, I have addressed both of these issues so that groups can have more freedom to develop.

Forums

In Social Groups 2.0, I wanted to make group forums a much more versatile solution that allowed for multiple discussion areas with varied permissions. The simplest solution to the issue was the creation of subforums within a group.

Now subforums can be added to a group directly through the group management page. This means that group owners, admins, or any rank which has permission to manage the group will be able to add or remove forums quickly and easily.

The process of adding a subforum is extremely straight forward. On the group management page, you select the “Forums” tab where you will see a list of all of the forums and subforums. The main forum for the group is marked with the “Parent” tag since it is the parent for all of the other forums in the group.


Example group forum page with a single subforum for staff discussion.

From this page you can press the add forum button to create a new subforum in your group discussion. On the forum creation page you get options to set the forum name as well as permissions for who can view, read, interact, and moderate the forum.


This is an example of the creation of a staff subforum for a group. It is important to note that the ranks which are displayed in these permission settings are not the “User Groups” which are created in IPB but rather “Ranks” which are specific to this particular Social Group. The rank feature will be covered later in this post.

After the forum is created it will show up on the group discussion page as a subforum. It behaves just like any other forum in IPB except that it gets special permissions applied to it based on how it was configured within the Social Groups forum system. So in the example of the Staff Forum, only members who have the rank of Admin or Moderator within this group will be able to see that forum; all other members will be completely unaware that the forum even exists.

With this system you can create as many subforums for your group as you need and configure the permissions in whichever way you want.

Ranks

The second issue with running complex group hierarchies within the Social Groups application is the need to accommodate expanded user ranks in a group. With the release of Social Groups 2.0 every group will have the ability to create an unlimited number of member ranks. Each defined member rank has its own unique set of permissions to allow for fine grain control over what each group’s members’ can see and do.


All of the ranks for the group are displayed on a single page in an interface that is very similar to the group forum listing.

You see that there are two additional options on the bottom of the group manage page which let you define a default rank and a guest rank. These settings allow for the group admin to define which rank is assigned to members who have not joined this group as well as which rank is assigned to members when they first join the group.

I have also added an ACP interface to the rank system which lets the site admin define which ranks are created by default in when a group is established. The only major difference between the ACP user rank interface and the inidividual manage group user rank page is the setting to assign an owner rank. This setting will define a rank that is assigned to the group owner when they create a group.


The group rank management page in the ACP allows for default ranks to be defined so that they are automatically added upon group creation.


That’s it for the second update. Keep on the lookout for the next blog entry which should be out later this week! Also note that I am only covering the major new feature additions in these blog entries. There are many small changes, tweaks, and new features which have been added to Social Groups 2.0. You will be able to see those when Social Groups 2.0 is released in beta.

[I really think that these new features will help make Social Groups a more usable and overall a more enjoyable product. Please leave any thoughts and feedback you have in the comments below.