Implementing Groups feature

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4/14/2011 9:41:20 AM
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Implementing Groups feature

Hello - I am fairly new to MojoPortal (been working with it for a week now).

I am attempting to implement a feature for my site that will support a groups type format and I was wondering if anyone knew of a feature in the existing framework that might support this.

Let me describe in more detail what I am trying to do.

I have a Main site with global information.  User's login here and only here.

I want to allow user's to create a group (child site).  The child site would have specific roles and permissions.

Child creator, Child admin, Child member, etc...

The child admin would have the ability to configure the child site - adding calendar, photos, newsletter, etc...

Any other user would have the ability to join or request to join a child site.

Only child site members would have permission to post on the child site.

I have attempted to implement this by configuring the site for multi site (folders) with <add key="UseRelatedSiteMode" value="true"/>

This supports the single login function, but all members can post to all child sites.

If anyone has any suggestions, I would appreciate it.

Thanks

Dave
 

4/14/2011 10:26:38 AM
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Re: Implementing Groups feature

When you set <add key="UseRelatedSiteMode" value="true"/>, that means that all user IDs and roles are shared among all sites. If you want the membership and permissions to be distinct in each site, you need to set this to false.

I think you can do this as long as you do the step "I want to allow user's to create a group (child site)" yourself, rather than allowing users do that. The reason is that in order to create a child site, a user has to be administrator on the main site, which I really don't think you want.

I think your general workflow could be:

  1. Trusted user requests a new site.
  2. You create the new site, add the user to that site as administrator, and let them know that it's ready.
  3. They go ahead and set up the new site as they want.
  4. Other users would register on the new site.

This way, each user would be the administrator of only their own site.

As an alternative, you might want to consider the mypage feature, although this might not be as flexible as you want.

Jamie

4/14/2011 10:30:52 AM
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Re: Implementing Groups feature

In addition to what Jamie has said, I'd like to add that I do not recommend letting strangers create their own sites or edit content in sites, only trusted users should be allowed to do that.

See the bottom of the About mojoPortal page for more information about what mojoPortal is Not Intended for and why.

Best,

Joe

4/14/2011 11:58:17 AM
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Re: Implementing Groups feature

Yea - I understand what you are saying about trusted and untrusted user's.  I had that problem before.

The problem with not using the related sites feature; it that user's would end up with multiple logins for each site.

I assume that the logins are not synched between sites.

I may try making a separate html page and then allow permissions on a per user basis (not role based).

I think this would provide the flexibility.

4/14/2011 8:22:50 PM
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Re: Implementing Groups feature

Well thanks for your advise and time.

Not sure what I will end up doing with the biker site, but I have several other sites that I am converting from classic ASP that I wrote years ago.  The biker site is the most complex for sure.

The others are a better fit for MojoPortal I think (Car club, TaeKwonDo site, Local band, Photographer)

Thanks again

Dave

4/15/2011 6:04:39 AM
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Re: Implementing Groups feature

I think you should think of Roles as Groups, it is conceptually the same thing, you create a role and add members to the role and you have users grouped into roles and permissions are based on role membership. So a separate concept is not needed for Groups.

You can create top level pages that can be edited by specific roles and when they create child pages below that they automatically inherit the same role permissions, so you can easily create sections of a site that can only be edited by specific roles (other than admins and content admins which can edit anything). So it is easy for organizations to delegate edit permissions to certain sections of their site to certain groups of users within their organization by using roles.

Best,

Joe

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