Kevin Carwile

There will be some widgets included with the 1.1 release that will show featured collaborations and such, just like there are widgets included with the forums app that show featured forum topics. This way you can place the widgets/blocks on whichever pages suit you. But GC makes no assumption that you have Forums installed on your site, or any other app for that matter, so if you decide to place widgets or create forum links, that's entirely up to you.

​That ability will be included with the GC 1.1.0 release coming very soon!

​1. There seems to be confusion that Group Collaboration replicates the functionality of core apps for groups, but actually, the core app is still in charge the whole time and GC just manages the additional permissions and "groups" all app content together based on the the group it belongs to. This means that whatever features that are available in the app are untouched. So if you set up a pages database and allow it to be used inside of groups, then revisions are part of the options you use to set up the database in the ACP.

2a. A group leader can choose how the group accepts new memberships. It can be changed by the group leader at any time.

• A "free join" group setting allows members to join without needing approval if the group is not full or the member has not reached any limits imposed by the site admin.
• An "approval required" group settings allows member to REQUEST membership. Any group member with "approval" permission will be able to accept them into the group.
• An "invite only" group setting removes the ability for outsiders to initiate membership on their own, and new members must be "invited" by existing group members with the invite permission. After a user has been invited, they can accept or deny the membership invitation.
• A "closed group" setting means that the group is not accepting any new members. Users cannot apply for membership, nor can group members send invites.

2b. Any number of "roles" can be created inside the group, and those roles can have different permissions and member titles assigned to them so you can differentiate between the members in your group. You can set a default member title for new members and also a member title based on the highest role assigned to them (and optionally change their member title on an individual basis). You could create a role for "New Recruit" to assign to new recruits if it suits your needs.

3. A user has a "membership" to any group that they are a part of. That "membership" can be edited and has a notes section. You could decide as a site administrator what, when, where, and how you want to display that information via the theme layer.

4. All post counts activity is kept as a separate tally inside the group. Based on how you configure the category, it can also add to global site counts, but all activity internal to the group can be tracked individual to the group as a whole, and on a member by member basis.

Yes, there will be migration tools coming. The plan is to build them right into the app. And it is a priority feature so I wouldn't expect a very long wait. I'll PM you with more details.

​GC has built in support and comes equipped with friendly urls via the core IPS system. They can be customized in the same way that any other friendly url's can be customized within the system. However, doing more advanced customizations of friendly url's outside the abilities of IPS core is also outside the scope of the GC app since it is not a FURL management product within itself.

Even so, I have no doubt that there will be such apps produced for IPS4 which will cater to those types of advanced needs. And since GC operates within all the same parameters as core IPS products, it will be fully compatible as well.

​The "site guest" member group permissions are controlled by the permission matrix on the collab category itself (set by the site administrator), since global site member groups are outside the domain of individual collabs. For example, If the site administrator has set a permission policy to not allow site guests (non logged-in members) to post to collaborations, then it should not be within the authority of a collab group owner to override that.

​Thanks for pointing that out. Since collaboration permissions extend the core IPS member group permissions into the collab group level, the core IPS is not aware of the additional permissions that need to be enforced. I'll make sure to hook into VNC and get that hooked up so everything can stay buttoned up tight.

​These two items are already built into GC. You can manage your collaborations by clicking your account username dropdown at the top of the page and clicking "Collaboration Memberships". You can transfer collabs that you are the owner of into the hands of another member.

Any content containers ( such as forums ) owned by the collaboration group have their own permission matrix available through the collab management. When you see the permissions for "Guests", that would be referring to collaboration guests ( in other words, everybody that is not a group member ).

​These are all very great ideas. In fact, we've discussed most of them to a degree in this thread already and they will all be baked into GC for the next minor release.

​Originally, I had all of the collaboration management menu options in that dropdown when I built the prototype. During development at some point, I had realized that it would be prudent to give collaborations their own customizable menu to link to their own pages of interest, so I moved the collab admin menu to its current position and left the dropdown for the collab menu where it is.

So to answer your question, that is where your custom links will eventually go.

​I was finally able to dig into someone's board that was doing this also and it turns out that it's a bug in IPS core. It has to do with the fact that you are using a database prefix and that prefix is not handled correctly in certain fringe cases by the internal database driver. I've submitted a bug report in the tracker so this should be fixed by the next release, RC4.

For those of you who are having this problem and don't want to wait for RC4 to come out, PM me and I can send you a core patch that you can upload to bypass the issue in RC3.

​All configurations are supported and the product is built using standard core management interfaces. It extends all of the same management options, permissions systems, and application features that you will already be familiar with from the IPS4 suite and puts them into group context and makes them available from the front end. It's as if you are allowing your groups to manage their own IPS4 suite's inside of your own IPS4 suite. Aside from GC's addition of membership management features for the group, everything else is stock IPB. This way any other content types, apps, and plugin features you add to your site will also be available inside of groups the same way they are outside.

For example, the forum configuration form a group leader uses to create forums inside his group is the same form you use in the ACP. And post counts inside of a group are tracked independently from main site posts, so when a group leader chooses to have a minimum post count to create topics in his forum, that limit applies in context to just his group. Or if he changes a member's title, it applies only in context to his group. So when that member posts inside the group, his member title may be different than if he posts outside the group. But the behavior of the app (such as forums) is exactly the same either way.

I imagine that I will have written a book on it all by the time the product has fully matured. But for now, you'll have to take it in foreword and cliff notes.

Group Collaboration does not modify or interfere with your forums index. Rather, it allows individual groups to have their own forums index, or gallery index, or calendar index, or whatever. It's designed to keep group content separate from your main site content so you don't have one obnoxiously unorganized "top level" site.

I've put together some more screenshots for you. Hopefully this helps you to understand what's going on a little better. But nothing beats getting hands on with it. Make sure you download the demo version as soon as you get a site going!

Download Group Collaboration Demo   |    View Screenshots

​Absolutely they can join groups themselves. There are lots of screens, which ones are you interested in seeing?

Members can create their own groups, and can set how they want memberships to be processed. They can set their group to allow anybody to join without approval, or they can allow members to join with approval ( meaning a member requests to join and a group member with permission to approve new members approves them ), or the group can be invite only, or it can be closed to new memberships altogether.

The group leader can create "roles" for the group, and assign permissions to those roles, and then assign those roles to group members to give group members permission to do just about anything the group leader can do.

@Fr3elanc3r I'll PM you to get more details and see if I can't get you squared away.

​Agreed.

​Look for new abilities in an upcoming release which promotes "featured" groups on their respective parent's category page, which would allow you to highlight certain groups with ease and they would be "featured" not only in the category they are in, but in their parent category ( i.e the Collaboration main tab ).

​Can't forums be created as links already? Just create some main forums that point to your groups of interest that you want to cross pollinate.

​Pages are outsourced to the pages app. No need to recreate existing functionality. You can create independent pages via the pages app and either link to them or include them as content however you wish on the collaboration index page via the theme layer.

Ah. That's going to happen with any app you try to upload. Your build of Apache/PHP does not include the Phar extension which is used by IPS4 to unpack the tar archive format. You'll need to recompile your build of PHP to include the PHAR extension in order to use the uploader in IPS4. It isn't related to Group Collaboration.

The good news is that you can work around the issue if you are unable to unzip the .tar archive yourself. You can use a free utility like 7zip to extract the contents from the .tar archive. Then you just need to upload the "collab" folder to your ./applications directory on your website. Once that is done, you will see the application listed in your ACP under the "Applications not currently installed" heading at the bottom of the applications page. You can then install it without needing the PHAR extension to PHP.

If you have further questions related to that error or how to fix it, please direct them to the IPS staff or just PM me directly.

@Ocean West Very well said. All spot on.

Another thing to note is that you can choose to allow groups in a category to use certain types of content (such as Forums, Galleries, Downloads, etc), but decide whether those groups will have permission to add/edit/delete those containers ( Forums, Galleries, Download Categories, etc) from their group.

This is noteworthy because I've also included a very important feature called "Group Models" to GC also, which allow you to create the ideal group structure for newly created groups and new groups will be created based on that model. So if you set up a group model for your gaming groups which have 4 different forums to start with (like recruitment, member lobby, strategy discussion, leadership discussion ), then all new groups will have those forums also when they are created.

So you can decide whether the group has the ability to add/edit/delete from those base forums to suit their own needs, or whether they must use what you give them. Of course this same principle applies to every content type, not just forums. And it is configured on a per content type basis, so you may want to allow them to add/edit/delete their own forums, but not the galleries you provide them. Or maybe you want to allow them to delete what they don't need, but not add more. It's pretty flexible.

If you do allow them to add their own content containers, you can also set limits on the maximum amount of forums. galleries, etc that they will be able to create.

It will not work with 3.x. It's exclusively for IPS4. Sorry. It's an inexpensive mod. No demo either, just the description and screenshots.

​Great idea. I already have in my roadmap a plan to implement a set of GC features which will adapt existing widgets to give site administrators the ability to target widgets to groups in addition to the app/module/controller targeting IPS core uses for widget placement. With correct execution, ads will also fall into that fold.

​GC does a lot to track, brand, and organize group content, but still allows the apps that host the content drive the pages fully. This means that FURLs, templates, and other system mods all are going to work with GC just as they would without. So if anything special needs to be done to forums or their furls in order to work nicely with tapatalk, then a mod that addresses that need can be installed and will work the same inside of GC as it does outside.

​It's going to be from the date of purchase.

​I have been approached a couple times already regarding building some migration utilities for people coming from other apps. I think that is a great idea and I'd like to see everybody using the new IPS4 Suite coupled with Group Collaboration! I'll be considering the best way to go about tackling that after GC has been in the wild long enough to be sure it's stable.

The downloads have been updated with compatibility with RC1.

I can confirm also. It seems they've made some changes in RC1 which is causing 500 error. I'll troubleshoot and update the download ASAP.

​I will make sure that goes into the next update. Currently, the task could be accomplished with a simple SQL query. But in the end, yes, it can be done fairly simply.

​You can download the demo version in the marketplace to give it a ride yourself.

Interesting. I'll PM you for details.

Group Collaboration for IPS4.x +

With group collaboration, members of your community are able to form their own groups, ranks, memberships and micro communities within the fold of your whole community.

Any group can collaborate to create, maintain, and manage its own content based on what you allow as the site administrator. Out of the box, you can allow groups to manage their own forums, galleries, calendars, blogs, downloads, databases, and more. You control all the permissions and limits.

A perfect solution for gaming clans, development teams, social groups, client collaboration projects, school clubs, faith groups, or any other type of application where you want to delegate specific features of your IPS Community Suite to individual groups in a controlled manner.

Marketplace:

Download Demo Version   |    Download Full Version