ocPortal Tutorial: Creating sub-communities (and sub-sites)

Written by Chris Graham, ocProducts

ocPortal is designed to be able to support large community sites, and a common features of the largest sites is to have sub-communities within the larger community. There are a number of features in ocPortal to support this, including:

Zones (different zones may be created for each sub-community, located under a URL beneath the mail site, with their own set of pages)
Redirection pages (using redirection pages, common modules, such as the download module, may be made to appear as if they are running from individual zones)
Categories, and virtual roots (using a combination of separate categories [and sub-branches there-of] for different sub-communities, and the 'virtual root' system, it can be made to appear that each sub-community has their own catalogue/download/gallery
Comcode pages, Chat rooms, Polls, IOTDs (all these support individual creating and referencing, such that different instances can be presented to different sub-communities)
Banners, Calendar (all these support category based referencing such that a division between sub-community interests can be created)
Sub-forums (different communities can be given their own branch of the discussion forums)
Themes (different themes may be applied to different zones, giving sub-communities individual looks)
User groups and access privileges (members of sub-communities may be grouped by user group, and permissions assigned accordingly)
Custom profile fields [OCF users only] (custom profile fields can be made so that they only apply to a single user-group: thus allowing specification of user data that applies only to specific sub-communities)

Table of contents

ocPortal Tutorial: Creating sub-communities (and sub-sites)

Multi-Site-Networks

For some sites, it is advantageous to be able to create a whole website for each sub-community, each with it's own settings, yet sharing a single member database and forums. This is possible using an ocPortal configuration known as a 'multi-site-network' and essentially involves separate ocPortal installs that are tied together by sharing a forum database; ocPortal provides special features for multi-site-network sites, and there is separate tutorial on them: as they involve separate installs, most of the features described in this tutorial are not necessary.
Advantages to using a multi-site network:

Full control
Cleaner administrative separation
Special multi-site-network features, such as the 'netlink' system

Disadvantages to using a multi-site network:

Overhead of additional configuration and maintenance
Per-site licensing

Zones

Adding a new zone for our Church Of Santa subcommunity

ocPortal zones are sub-directories of your site, that operate with different settings. By default, ocPortal contains a number of zones:

Welcome (/)
Admin Zone (/adminzone) - Where ocPortal is configured
Collaboration (/collaboration) - Where privileged members may access collaboration tools (available to enterprise version users only)
Site (/site) - Where the majority of the ocPortal modules are, by default
Docs (/docs) - Documentation
CMS (/cms)
Personal Zone (/personalzone) - For OCF users only
Forum (/forum) - For OCF users only

Viewing our zone (in it's custom theme)

You may add new zones, edit zones, delete zones, and move pages between zones from the Admin Zone. When performing an action that will add, rename or delete a zone, you will need to provide details that tell ocPortal how it can do this; this is because on the majority of web hosting configurations, PHP does not have full access to files on the hosting account. These details are the same as you may have provided when using the ocPortal quick installer.

To finalise the zone, FTP details will be needed so ocPortal can create the directory structure properly

To change the logo image for a zone, add a theme image named '<zone-name>-logo'. By default zones use the logo image of the Welcome Zone.

Redirection pages

Managing redirection pages

Adding a download category for the NewTown Parish subcommunity

{!DOC_REDIRECTS}

Redirections are useful for a number of reasons, including:

Sharing modules between zones
Making short-cuts to zone/page combinations
Making it so obvious URL mistakes can be automatically corrected
When moving pages, a redirect may be placed so that links are not broken

Virtual roots

Viewing the download category we added, we can find the virtualisation URL

A number of ocPortal modules contain categories organised into a tree structure, including:

galleries
download categories
catalogue categories

The virtualed download category

If sub-community categories are stored under a common sub-tree of the full category tree, then the root of the 'sub-tree' may be made into the apparent root of the full-tree, by picking it as a virtual-root. This is easy to do, and doesn't involve any kind of configuration other than finding the URL to enter the module with; to find this URL, you just look for the link of the current category in the back-navigation bar on a category page: this is a mouthful to explain, but really very simple. Once you have the URL, you may wish to add it to to the menu of your sub-community zone.

User group management

Adding a new user-group

The OCF system has a powerful user-group system, based on the ability for members to be in a primary group, and any number of secondary groups. When members join, they are placed, by default, in the lowest group in a 'ranked' progression of user-groups: the member moves up along these ranked groups as they accumulate points, and their visible rank, and privileges change in accordance. It is recommended that you leave all non-staff members such that their primary group stays within this rank progression, and use secondary groups for the purpose of placing them in sub-communities, and granting additional permissions (a member has the 'best' permission combination out of all the permissions granted to all of their user-groups).

OCF allows you to choose which secondary user-groups a member is placed in when they join. Setting of default user-groups allows you to give people permission "by default", but to take it away if they abuse it without having to put them onto a different rank progression. For example, a 'debates' forum could be created and only the 'Civil Debater' group given access; the 'Civil Debater' group could be a default group, meaning all have access by default - however, members who demonstrated an inability to debate in a civil manner could be removed from it.

It is also possible to give members a choice from a number of primary user-groups when they join. This is especially useful for what I call 'role-based communities', where different members use the website in such a way that is distinct to their role on it. By assigning user-group according to role, it is possible to use various ocPortal features in order to customise the site for each role provided.

Managing the members of a user-group

You may opt to assign a leader to secondary groups, or to leave them leaderless. A group leader has the ability to control who is in their group, taking pressure away from the staff. Otherwise, only administrators may add users to groups (this is not done using privileges, as it would grant the ability for any member with such as privilege to escalate themselves to administrator status).

Members may apply to join groups if they wish, and the group leader or administrators may decided to accept or decline their application; members may also choose to 'resign' from a group. All group membership management is performed on the group-view page.

You can attach new rank images to groups on the usergroup editing screen. The usergroups admin module (which allows selection of a usergroup to edit) is available from the 'Security' section of the Admin Zone.

Concepts

virtual root: Virtual roots allow you to split an ocPortal tree based content system (such as the download system) so it appears to have multiple databases
redirection page: Allows pages to be redirected to from different zone/page combinations, either transparently, or with a redirection message