Thread

A community colleague recently asked a question about using a member’s group to serve the content the member is interested in to them. The example used was content grouped something like “vegetarian”, “health conscious”, “carnivorous”, etc.
Is this segregation best served by using different groups for the members? -OR- Would something else work better (custom fields? categories? other?)? There’s no need to restrict “vegetarian"s from seeing the “carnivorous” content 😛  
The type of content the member was interested in would be provided by the member upon registration in a custom profile field, and the member would have the ability to modify the field at any time.
Please share your thoughts. Thanks! -C

In my mind, you have two totally seperate issues…
1) The segration of content
2) Serving/Displaying that content

For the first, I would use categories or use a custom field to designate what type of content it is.

For the second, you’ll need to figure out a way to associate types or categories with a member. My first inclination is to use a custom cookie but I’m lousy at that. I don’t think I’d do it by membership group as you would have to then have them change groups if they changed their mind on the type of content they wished to see.

I probably don’t completely understand the goal…but if a site has its content well-architected and the navigation provides paths to different types of content—what more needs to be done?  People will navigate to the content that interests them and ignore the rest….

The way I took it Boyink is kind of like a theme switcher but for content, just another way to get the content one has interest in.

It wouldn’t be a free solution, but one way to do this is to use MSM, and set up additional sites which would further segregate the content in the back end.

Or just use different template groups for each group.

IMHO it sounds like one of those things that’s more hassle than it’s worth - both for the developer and user.  If the site has content and audiences that are that disparate and normal content segregation through different site sections or categories won’t suffice, then as Sue suggests maybe separate sites are a better approach.