Question Private Group forums and Public group forums for JomSocial

Ive had to Host Kunena on a separate website then use Joomla's Wrapper function as a temporary fix.

I certainly cant have everyone who needs to use our Forum accessing JomSocial. Its caused loads of confusion.

It would be awesome to finally have this feature.

The ideas for creating private "forums" - or to be more technically accurate, private categories - whether or not for JomSocial or any other social network-related Joomla extension, have been kicked around many times before. See [Merged topic] User Groups, User Group Privileges, ACLs .

Although it's possible to implement some kind of "group" demarcation within your website using a combination of tools for Joomla 1.5 (e.g Community Builder and JomSocial already have these features and frameworks like NoixACL also extends J! 1.5 functionality) the full realisation of this potential will not be accomplished natively within Joomla until J! 1.6. Perhaps this area is one of the major weaknesses of Joomla in comparison with other open source frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal - see Wordpress vs Joomla vs Drupal , Drupal, WordPress, or Joomla? (A Trick Question) and The World's Greatest CMS as examples of other people's opinions. Whatever are the currently-held beliefs about Joomla in comparison with other open source CMS frameworks, when Joomla 1.6 arrives those beliefs will need to be revised.

Going forward, Kunena 1.7 is already in the early design stages and one of the key deliverables being examined is support for private "forums"; that is to say, the ability to have one site, one Kunena installation, satisfy the individualistic needs of a diverse community: to keep the discussion topics separated from one another.

Let me illustrate a possible business case. Suppose you are developing a website for a club. Let us say that the club's management has specified the following types of users who will need access to the site:

1. Administration
   • Management
   • Staff
2. Membership
   • General membership interests
     • Events
     • Services (e.g. dining, event bookings, hours of operation, venue locations, facilities offered by the club, etc.)
     • Specialised membership interests
       • Sporting-related interests, e.g. tennis, lawn bowls, swimming
       • Health and fitness
       • Social and interests e.g. card nights, darts, chess, toastmasters, parents without partners, morning coffee gatherings, etc.

As you can see, people involved within the club may belong to several of these classes at the same time and they will need access to all of the classes to which they belong. It's possible to have, for example, club employees who are also a members of the gym and who participate in the same activities as ordinary members. In fact, the possibilities can be a quite complex than how I've tried to illustrate with this simple example.

Meeting this requirement in Joomla 1.5 is just not that easy to do. Joomla 1.6 will make things better and Kunena, going forward, will exploit the ability to do that in the sense of having private "forums".

I hope some of what I've written helps this discussion - even though I am not a JomSocial user and I'm not conversant with the features contained in JomSocial.

You mentioned demarkation within groups of Jsocial. I have various private groups setup. Is it possible to 'attach' individual forums to groups by registration? (invitation). The idea of having only one general forum to my site does not suit my purposes. My groups are invitation only. I would like forums to match, preferably linked.

G'day, simon0667, and welcome to Kunena

When I spoke of group demarcation I was discussing matters in a general Joomla sense. Because I don't have specific knowledge of JomSocial (or Jomsocial groups) I really don't know how to answer your question in that narrower JomSocial sense. We'll have to leave that for someone else to answer, someone who has more technical understanding of how those things work and whether JomSocial provides the means to achieve what you want.

Thanks for the answer Sozzled

The reason I ask is that there is a third party plug in available, but am not too keen on adding it if there is the possibility of a Kunena made plug in down the track.

While I cant speak for everyone, I know that on my site if the private groups had there own forum available, my site would become less confusing and I believe activity would increase 10 fold as now it is split, half using the forum, half using the JomSocial groups.

Is there a solution for this idea yet? I need it as well.