Hi

I’m exploring using the discussion forum as a way of running courses. My client was considering Moodle, but her courses seem simple enough to run off the forums.

I’m wondering how best to construct the member permissions.

My client sells courses, so it is important that Members are restricted to particular forums, they shouldn’t be allowed to see another course. There will be about 15 courses. Is there a way of restricting read access to particular members, or is it only possible via member groups? Member groups would be difficult, since people could be signed up to more than one course, and I don’t think you can have access to more than one member group?

Another consideration is whether to create an entire board per course, or have all the courses on one board.

Thanks,
Richard

Hm- I think having all courses on one borard vs. board per course is purely a matter of personal preference.  But the restricting by member bit….

You can’t exactly do it ‘out of the box’ like you can with member groups.  And unless he’s only going to have 5-10 students, that would get to be a giant pain.  What I would do is flip php on for the templates and use that to limit forum access.  I don’t think it would be too bad figuring out where to add it- you could follow the regular member group conditionals already in there.  MIGHT could do it purely with {member_id} type conditionals, but I won’t swear and I’d probably start out with php.

PLUS- you’re really going to need some way to manage the individual members and their access.  Which suggests to me a custom module. 

You might check out Solspace.com- I know they have a ‘User module’ that allows more control on a per member level.  But- I haven’t played with that one and can’t swear it would handle what you want to do.  Still- I’d take a look over there.  You might find something that does the trick.

And- if we need to get too deep in this one, I’ll probably shift to ‘How to’ for brainstorming.

But the above make sense?  It’s likely doable- but definitely some custom work to do it right.

This is important to us, for the same reasons. I’ll follow up with a post at Solspace (User).

Yep- I’m kind of thinking the user module and some php in the forum templates might do it.  But I haven’t played with the user module myself.  And I think I will go ahead and shift to ‘How to’ in case anyone else has some ideas on it.