One of the major goals for Sueetie is for a Community to support groups—10, 20, hundreds of ‘em! I first released Sueetie.com with 3 groups but since reduced that to a single Public Demo Group for proof of concept while I worked through architectural and administrative issues. I am happy to tell you about the Groups Architecture groundwork now complete and which will be available in Gummy Bear 1.2 coming soon.
The Groups Architecture in Sueetie works hand-in-hand with the SueetieApplications model where context intelligence is now available anywhere in a Sueetie Community. We covered the SueetieApplications class along with the new Applications Management piece. To complete Sueetie Applications we needed Sueetie Groups. Here is the new Sueetie Groups management form.
The form reveals a few characteristics of the Sueetie Groups Architecture. Each group has an Administrator and Member Role, with the defaults being GroupAdministrator and Registered roles respectively. This tells us that ASPNET Roles will be playing a big part in Sueetie Groups permissions. I didn’t want to go that way, but it’s the most natural course given how the Sueetie group applications (BlogEngine.NET and the rest) play so well with ASPNET Membership. I want to keep the number of Sueetie Roles small, but I don’t think we need to fear a large number of roles to support the group permissions model. The worse case would be if a site had, say, 100 groups, and each group needed its own unique Administrator and Member Role. That’s 200 roles. Still not bad. And that scenario would be rare.
You also see the group types listed. They are 1) Public, 2) Private Listed, where everyone can see the group listed and they can voluntarily join, 3) Private Listed Invite Only, where everyone can see the group listed but must request membership or be invited to join, and 4) Private Unlisted. By invite only.
With Membership Roles playing a big part in groups I needed to beef-up and extend the Sueetie Roles architecture. Below is the updated Roles Management form where new Group Administrator and Group Users flags were added to Role definitions. This works with the dropdown lists in the Group Administration form and elsewhere to filter-out non-group function roles with site roles.
This is a good time to remind our viewers that Sueetie doesn’t lock you into a http://site.com/groups/somegroup construction. The “/groups/” folder is defined in the Sueetie General Settings to give you the freedom to define groups by site group function. http://site.com/clients, http://site.com/classes, http://site.com/states, etc.
I’ve always been excited about the potential of Sueetie Groups, especially when you consider the price. :-) I’m a bit surprised we got here so soon, though I should mention that while I don’t plan to include working groups in Gummy Bear 1.2, this good groups goundwork sends us far down that road to Sueetie Group Nirvana.