Lost group access rights since 1.7

In  pre 1.0 and in versions 1.6-1.7, you could set access rights to those of any group you were a member of, whether or not it was posted within the group context. Now this option has gone again in 1.8.  A group's permissions are only available in that group's context and nowhere else.

As a university, our members have extensively used the ability to set group permissions outside the group for courses where students blog in their own space but may choose to set permissions to those of the course group. We generally use a combination of tags and modified group member activity tools to selectively re-aggregate them at the group level. This is great for helping to give a sense of ownership and as a means of keeping group clutter to a minimum.

I understand the logic of the design decision behind the change, but has anyone come up with a workaround or might the feature re-appear again? We have hundreds of posts like this and courses that rely on this capability so it's not an option to lose it. 

So far we've thought of two imperfect workarounds, in both of which we allow people to treat groups as collections, and hence get them into their list of available access rights, but both solutions have further repercussions that are awkward and will lead to different kinds of trouble in other places (either weird behaviours for such collections or issues relating to following too many people). I guess we could override the core behaviour so that things work the same as before, but that brings its own problems and, as I say, I do see the logic in limiting group permissions to the group and only the group.

Jon

  • This was a conscious decision because it was creating confusion and users were ending up with very long access lists when they belonged to a lot of groups.

    I prefer this as a default with a hook so that sites can add all groups to the access control if they want it. The hook is easy to use. It passes an array of label => access level. It is called: 'access:collections:write', 'user'. The groups plugin has an example of using this hook. It adds the current group to the access control.

  • I tried to do this earlier, Cash, but something odd was happening that I haven't been able to debug yet.  Basically, when I add the groups acls it didn't work, but sending a test array through would work.

    See: http://community.elgg.org/pg/forum/topic/881972/confusing-scenario-with-plugin-hook/

    I'll have another go tomorrow, I may have missed something obvious.

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