OG D7 Part 01 : Intro - OG use cases, the very basics...

Hi All,

Welcome to another blog related to Drupal. Today we will see what ORGANIC GROUPS in drupal 7 is all about.

Basically in this part we will discuss what feature groups being to the website in general.

From the end users perspective :

1. one should be able to create a new group or join and existing group.
2. one should be able to leave the group as well - close one's own or leave any group.
3. one should be able to see the list of all the members in the group one has joined. Remember one can only see the members of the group only if you are the member/ subscriber of the group yourself.
4. one should be able to see the list of all the groups he or she is a member of.
5. one should be able to see the list of all the existing groups on website.
6. one should be able to see what new messages or posts or comments that are added to the group and get email alerts for them.
7. members of the group should be able to communicate with one another using various content types such as blogs, stories, pages, polls, file directories, picture galleries, links gallery and so on...

From the website owners or siteadmins perspective :

1. one should be able to categorize groups in to different categories.
2. one should be able to create the groups as either private or public. A public group is a group whose contents are viewable to non-members. A private group is a group whose contents are visible only to it's own members and NOT visible to non-members. 
3. one should be able to post private or public content in private or public groups.
4. I think it is important to know the following things about visibility of groups and their content:
• By default groups are public with public content.
• But if you make a private group, then it will not be visible on the website and be only visible to it's members.
• if there is a private content in a private group, that content is also not visible to non-members.
• if there is a public content in a private group, that content is visible to non-members of the group but the group itself is not visible to non-members.
• Example 01:
• a public-group-01 when created will be visible to all users of the website. Any content created on the group will also be visible to all users of the website.
• a private content, say article-01 when created will only be visible to Joe who is a member of this group and not visible to Jane who is not a member of this group.
• Example 02: 
• a private-group-02 when created will not be visible to say Joe who is not a member of this group but will be visible to Jane is she is a member of this private group.
• public content say article-02-public created in the private-group-02 will be visible to Joe even if he is not a member of this private group, but he will still not be able to see the private group on the website.
•  article-03-private created in the private-group-02 will only be visible to Jane who is a member of this private group.
5. the group manager should be able to add a user, invite any user or block an existing user or deny the request of any user to join the group. That is to say that the group manager should be able to manage the membership and membership requests of the group.
6. the group manager (or someone who created the group or is an owner of the group) should be able to specify if a user needs to request for a membership of the group or not. Also, if such request need to be approved by the group manager before making a user a member of the group.
7. one should be able to create different roles within the group such as group admin, moderators, premium members and general members. And be able to add / remove users from these roles of the group.
8. be able to maintain the home page of the group.
9. one should be able to set up the group as either selective or not selective - selective groups require approval in order to become a member, or even "invitation-only" groups.

And with this we come to an end of part-01 that tells us what groups are and what one could do there... thanks for your time and bfn...