IMPORTANT: Membership User Groups and Community Groups are different concepts. Membership User Groups let an administrator create a group of membership users, thereby reducing the effort required to assign identical permissions to many users. See Membership groups. Community Groups are explained in this section.
Community groups are another feature of Ektron's Community Platform. Group members can easily meet people with similar interests, such as car racing.
Groups have similar features and functions to user features. For example, a community group can have a Message Board, Discussion Board, maintain a membership list, and keep a group journal. You can manage community groups from the website or the Workarea.
You can assign a taxonomyA content-level categorization system that uses one-to-many relationships (such as Ronald Reagan is to Actor, Governor, and President) to create a scalable organization of content. A taxonomy lets your site visitors go content independent of the folder structure. category to a community group so that users can browse and search for groups by category. You also can assign tagA keyword that you assign to a user, group, content, or library item to give it additional identification.s to a community group, which let users find groups when searching by tag name.
You can access community group information in the following areas of the Workarea:
To view a list of all community groups in the Workarea, click the Settings > Community Management > Community Groups.
The following server controls are associated with community groups:
Any user with access to the Workarea can view a group’s details but cannot see group members. Only the group leader (also known as a group administrator), a member of the administrators group, or an Ektron user with the Community Group Administrator role can edit the group’s information, add and remove members, or delete the group.
Only the group leader (also known as a group administrator), a member of the administrators group, or an Ektron user with the Community Group Administrator role can view group members. These users can also add and remove members. And, if the group’s membership is Restricted, you can accept or decline requests to join the group.
NOTE: Restricted groups can be found in the same way that open groups can. Also, their activities are published as notifications. For example, Tom posted a reply to the forum topic titled 'RoboTech Acquisition'
. So, do not create a group or publish activities that you want to keep secret.
After you create a group, you can add members to it. See also: Adding members to a community group and Managing community groups
NOTE: The CommunityGroupBrowser server control also has a Create Group link, which lets you create a community group from the website. See also: CommunityGroupBrowser server control.
Only the group leader (also known as a group administrator), administrators or Ektron users with the Community Group Administrator role can add members to a group.
NOTE: If you leave the text box blank and click Search, all results for the name type are returned.
Only the group leader (also known as a group administrator), Administrators, or Ektron Users with the Community Group Administrator role can remove members from a group.
When you associate the CommunityDocuments or PhotoGallery server controlA server control uses API language to interact with the CMS and Framework UI to display the output. A server control can be dragged and dropped onto a Web form and then modified. with a community group, you can let members of the group add, remove, and control the sharing of folders in these controls.
If a group’s membership is set to Restricted (on the Community Group screen), users must request to join the group. (If membership is Open, users join a group immediately.) In the Workarea's View Community Group Members screen, use the Pending tab to accept or decline a user’s request to join a group.
Only a Group Administrator, Ektron Administrator, or Ektron users with the Community Group Administrator role can do this.
To accept or decline a member's request to join a group in the Workarea:
You can search for a Community Group in the Workarea by using the View All Community Groups page's Search box.
To search for Community Groups, click Settings > Community Management > Community Groups. Enter text in the search box and press Enter. Community Groups that match the search term appear.
On the website, Tag information for a group appears in the Group’s profile. In the Workarea, Tag information is on the View Community Group’s > Tag tab. From this tab, you can either create a new tag or select from a list of group tags.
When the Tag is saved, it appears in the Group Tags area with a check mark in the check box, which means the tag is active for the community group. If you have several tags, use the check boxes to choose the default tags that you want associated with the group.
You can use the Discussion Board feature within a community group to provide Web-based discussions on topics of interest to a group. To use this feature, each group must add the Discussion Board for their group into the database before posts can be added. To do this, see Using discussion boards for community groups.
Group discussions may include these topics:
The following image shows a discussion board on a community group page.
Ektron's Web Calendar keeps visitors informed about upcoming events. Combined with the powerful community features, the calendar enhances communication between individuals and groups. To use this feature, each group must add Calendar into the database before events can be added; see Creating a calendar in my profile.
Communities calendars events could include
The following image shows a calendar on a personal profile page.