The group functionality helps you organize your Web site's content and enhance communication between the members of your community. 

In this Article

Parent/child group architecture

The group organizing principle in previous versions of Telligent applications was the group category. A category could contain multiple groups, and each group within a category could have one application type apiece. However, the power of forums, wiki, and blogging environments was restricted within the group concept. When it would have been natural to create additional forums, blogs, or wikis within the group, administrators and group owners had to create a new group.

With Telligent Community, group owners have flexibility: They can create groups within groups so they have parent groups and child groups. This is a key component of the groups concept.

Support for multiple instances of applications

The groups concept is extended because in Telligent Community, both top-level groups and child groups can support multiple application instances. This allows group owners to organize group content in a logical way and allows users to access information more easily.

In previous versions of Telligent applications, site administrators could organize site information around groups, which essentially were mini-communities with independent membership. But groups could support only one instance of the forum, blog, media gallery and wiki applications. As social networking increased in communities, the amount of information present in the network increased as well, but the group design limited how customers could collect and organize information and data.  

When a user joins a group, he/she is automatically subscribed to its blogs and forums, and receives notifications about new posts.

Topic-driven navigation architecture 

Now, content is organized by content topic rather than by group applications. As content increases, group owners and administrators can move it to different applications within the group in a way that makes sense to users. Content can even be moved from one group to another. A child group can be moved to a top-level group, and vice versa.

URLs also reflect the topic-driven navigation structure.

Administrative functions separated from management functions

In previous versions of Telligent applications, a group's administrative functionalities were contained within the group management functionalities when the system administrator accessed the Control Panel. Now, however, administration and management functionalities are separated - giving a different look to the Control Panel's Dashboard. This means that the group functionalities are consistent with the other functionalities in the Control Panel.

Group types

In addition to group categories, administrators can choose from among the following choices:

  • Joinless - Membership is not tracked, and permission to the group is managed using site-level roles. Joinless groups are managed by system administrators unless an administrator creates a special role for managing a Joinless group. These groups do not have members, by definition.
  • Public open membership - Community users have visibility of group members, group activity, and additional group information in the sidebar.
  • Public closed membership - Community users have visibility of group activity and additional group information in the sidebar, but not of group members.
  • Private listed - Community users have visibility of users and group activity, but cannot participate in the group activity.
  • Private unlisted - Community users have no visibility of users or group activity.

Permissions and membership 

When a user joins a group, he/she inherits the permissions assigned to the group. If a user joins a child group, he/she inherits his/her permissions from the parent group. The permissions transfer to all the applications within a group with the exception of group blogs, which have the additional layer of permissions associated with a blog owner/author.

The "super groups" concept supports three levels of of membership:

Membership Description
Members Can create and view content in the group, view a list of group members, and invite new people to join the group.
Managers Have all of the permissions that members have and also have access to group management functionality.
Owners Have all of the abilities of a moderator, but have additional abilities to control the group settings, add new members, modify the group theme, create new application instances within the group, and modify the permissions associated with each role inside of their group. An owner can also create new roles for the group.