Thread

Hi,
Can user’s belong to multiple user groups? I want to do a job posting site and it’s users can belong to multiple groups. For example, a job seeker and a job provider. User’s can belong to both groups simulatneously. There will be functions enabled based on the user groups. For example, in order to post a job opening, the user must first fill out the job provider profile.

No, they can’t.

Thanks for the quick reply! Are there any workarounds for the scenario I described above?

Not as far as i know. You can only make another group that have the permissions of both other groups.

That would work for the permissions, but what if I wanted to store different fields about each user group. For example, if I had a site that has both buyers & sellers, like a simple auction site, and the users can be both buyers and/or sellers. There would be a different member profile page for buyers and sellers. Different types of info would be stored for buyers and sellers.

Would it be possible implement supertype/subtype relationships in EE? The supertype would be the general user account and the subtypes would be buyer & seller. I know this probably isn’t supported out of the box, but would hacking at the main DB schema help? Is this method feasible?

I’m hesitant to speak much on this, because the documentation doesn’t seem to make clear yet what the separations are between sites, but perhaps the Multi Site Manager add-on could be an approach to this problem?  Real-EE’ers will have to say.

In principle, I think you want some clear separation of roles, when a person can be one or another in a system, and those roles have quite different views.

If I understand it, MSM sites have a truly common user database among all the sites.  So that’s handy, given you can also add custom fields to the user table(s) that could be used from their appropriate roles.

For the user with more than one role, it would matter then which apparent website they logged into, with their same identity.

One important point among many is whether the MSM can support more than one concurrent login from a given browser: are cookies etc. kept separate?

Again, Ellis folks will have to say whether it’s their intention that the MSM add-on should solve this kind of case.

Kind regards, and interested too,
Clive

You might want to check out this thread…Custom User Groups

Hadn’t seen that one, PXLated.  Thanks for the ‘heads up’.  I’ll be needing something like that myself pretty soon and would prefer not to have to roll my own.

The MSM shares custom member fields- so while you can do some tweaking because the member profile templates are separate (thus on my registration forms I’ve hard coded showing different fields on different MSM sites)- they really aren’t set up for totally different member custom fields.  You can handle login cookies seperately, though.  So different accounts on different MSM sites.  But still, even with MSM, you don’t quite achive assigning members to multiple groups in the full sense.  Depending on your needs and creativity, you can come pretty close.  (And I’m going to check out that module- might prove handy!)

Thanks to everyone for the help. It looks like EE currently isn’t designed for assigning users to multiple user groups. Will this feature be implemented anytime in the near future?

They never discuss release dates but it is a popular feature request.

One of the more difficult ones to fulfill, though, from what I hear. I wouldn’t expect it before version 2.0.

I just came across the need for this again today - a member in multiple groups. Seems like every other site I do needs this in some way. For now, I’ll spend the rest of my day thinking of some sort of workaround!

I wrote a plugin that could tie custom member data to categories for weblogs… perhaps something could be done with that?  A member can have multiple custom member fields, and you can select weblog entries based on the category the entries are in.  It’s kind of what I’m doing to get around multiple member group issues… the custom member fields stand in for the groups, and the plugin allows those custom member groups to determine what category is used in a weblog entries tag.

Yeah, this is a bit much for the presales forum, sorry.