The primary function of the Groups page is to provide you with access to all of your community’s groups. A group is a mini-community with its own membership consisting of up to one blog, media gallery, and forum.

Community Server allows the site administrator to set up three types of groups:

• 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 - Community users have no visibility of users or group activity.

Some group activity and functionality may be invisible to you based on group type and your group membership status. All of a group’s content is accessible by members of the group. You will note that the Your Groups section contains a list of the groups to which you belong.

• Non-Members - In private groups, non-members cannot view or interact with any content. In public groups, non-members can view (but not interact) with the group's content.

• Members - Members can view and reply to existing content (blog posts, media files, forum threads) and view pages.  If enabled (via the "Edit Group" form), members can also start new forum discussions or post their own media files.

• Managers - Managers can do everything that regular members can as well as the following:

  • Post new pages

  • Edit and delete their own pages

  • Post , edit, and delete blog posts

  • Start new forum discussions (including sticky posts, announcements, polls, and video)

  • Edit, delete, and moderate forum posts

  • Post, edit, delete, and moderate media files.

• Owners - Owners can do everything that managers can do as well as edit the group and group theme, add and remove members, and edit pages.

Theming Groups

You can theme each individual group, similar to the way you theme blogs. The owner of each group can select a theme for the group and configure any options exposed by that theme via the Edit Group Theme link in the administrative sidebar of the group.

Customizing Group Themes

The group-related themes are located in the web/themes/hubs/ folder (groups are called hubs within the API and themes).  Within theme files, you can use the same <CSMedia:, <CSForum:, and <CSBlog: controls that are used for media gallery, forum, and blog content outside of groups to reference the group's content from these application types. Additionally, the <CSHub: control prefix identifies group/hub-specific data and functionality.

Accessing Groups Functionality

To administer a group, you must log on to Community Server.

You can access your community’s Groups main page by doing any of the following:

• Clicking Media on the Control Panel from any page in the community.

• Clicking View All Groups from your dashboard.

The Groups main page may look like this:

Browse Groups by Category Functionality

The Browse Groups by Category section displays below the Your Groups section. You can click on any of these groups to navigate to the group’s Web page. From there, you can pursue additional functionality, such as a request for membership to that group.

Groups Functionality

When you open a group, you will see additional functionality.

The Most Recent Content section contains the recent forum and blog posts published in the group. Note the icons to the left of each post indicate whether the post is located in the group forum or the group blog. You can click on the post title to open the post.

The section in the upper-right sidebar contains additional functionality.

The following table describes these functions.