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rapatapat's Blog

Excuse Me...Still Deciding...

Sorry, still need your advice. The social network I'm building has a bit more complexity, so wondering if Community Engine is a good starting point. 

I will need 3 different user account types, and the 3 account types will have different features set (eg. one account type will not have access to the blogging feature, another account type will have custom built features, still another account type will not have a public profile and will not be searchable, etc).

For example, maybe a social network for schools will have teacher accounts, student accounts, and parent accounts. Perhaps teachers and students will have public profiles, while parents may not (their account would just be to track students and grades or something). Teachers may have a blogging feature, while students and parents may never need to blog at all. (just using this example because i saw teacherly.com) While we're at it...would it easily be extensible to include "groups", the obvious application here being users joining schools, teachers associations, school clubs, etc. 

Will Community Engine plugin support this level of customization and extendability? ... and will it make a good starting point for a non-standard social network where everyone is basically treated the same in terms of features-set?

Thanks...I'm thinking this is a question for Bruno!

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thanks bruno...keep up the good work on this plugin! i see potential for greatness here!

Hey Rapatapat,

Great questions... currently, CommunityEngine doesn't support the kind of granular user level control you describe. Fortunately, it would be really easy for you to add, since you can override CE's controllers and models in your own application. For instance, if you wanted, you could replace the User model with one that supports roles (teacher, student, parent), and then override the PostsController to allow access to the create method only to Users with the teacher role.

Adding 'groups' is a similar issue: it's not included by default, but adding the functionality should be quite easy.

If you have a more specific example of functionality you'd like me to address, feel free to post it. I'd be happy to weigh in on wether I think it would be possible using CE.

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CommunityEngine Rocks!