Community structure has come a long way since the early days. Communities used to necessitate organizing content primarily by application. In Telligent Community, it is organized by groups that contain applications - making the context of information intuitive and easy to understand.

Community structure models

The following two sections demonstrate the difference between community content organized by application and by group.

Community structure organized by applications

Prior to the introduction of groups, you had to organize a community using an application-specific structure. Related content from different applications was not intuitively linked together. For example, you might have:

Forums

  • Product A support
  • Product B support

Blogs

  • Product A announcements
  • Product B announcements

Wikis

  • Product A documentation
  • Product B documentation

Media Galleries

  • Product A downloads
  • Product B downloads

You'll also note with the application structure, there is no relationship between different wikis and blogs. With group structure, you can put related forums, blogs, wikis and galleries into the same group.

Community structure organized by groups

With the introduction of groups into community structure, you can now much more easily navigate related content based upon membership or name, and utilize tags and other tools to locate related content quickly within the group.

Your users ultimately aren't interested in forums, blogs, wikis or  media galleries per se. They are really interested in getting support, viewing documentation, etc. For example, the same content as in the above section would be organized like this:

Product A

  • Announcements
  • Documentation
  • Support (forums)
  • Downloads

Product B

  • Announcements
  • Documentation
  • Support
  • Downloads

Once you realize the added power that groups give you, you'll be able to better see what you can do with customizing group landing pages  For example, if you have a group about a product you sell, you may want to put your documentation and latest announcements on the group homepage.  If, however, you've got a collaborative group, you may instead prefer to show a list of forum threads on the homepage.

Groups define areas of interest for your community and allow you to control the types of content and content levels that a group's community members can have.

This guide contains three sections which focus on changing group look and feel to meet your group's needs; the nuts and bolts of application and permission management, and managing group membership:

  1. Customize the look and feel of your group -  Use the group options page to specify what your group experiences in the GUI, and set its theme.
  2. Edit a group - Access group options, applications, and permissions.
  3. Email digest - Email Digest capabilities and supported clients.
  4. Manage group applications and permissions - Add, edit, or otherwise affect access and configurations of forums, blogs, wikis, and media galleries.
  5. Manage group membership - Add or remove members, learn about group roles, and move groups.
  6. Review appeals - Review the appeals of group members whose content is reported as abusive.