This plugin creates and maintains:

1. Global ACLs for each role defined in the system that contain all users with a given role

2. Role-based Friends collections for each user

Administrator interface (Admin -> Roles -> Manage ACLs) will allow you to specify, which access collections should be visible to users with a given role.

To illustrate the functionality:

Let's say your website has 2 roles defined: Teachers and Students.

After enabling this plugin, each user will have 4 new access collections:

1. All Teachers - all users that have registered in the system and have been assigned the Teacher's role

2. All Students - all users that have registered in the system and have been assigned the Student's role

3. 'Friended' Teachers - different for each user; contains all of user's friends with a Teacher's role

4. 'Friended' Students - different for each user; contains all of user's friends with a Student's role

As an administrator, you can allow Teachers to post content visible to e.g. other fellow teachers and all students. Students on the other hand maybe prevented from seeing any of the above in their Access dropdowns.

Please note that this hasn't been tested with very large user bases. Refer to your logs if operations time out on installation.