23 November 2009, 8:11

Ruslan and I are looking into ways of improving the Group membership system, primarily with a view to improving the usability from an administrator POV.

There are a couple of key areas we're looking to address and were wondering whether anyone may have any feedback on these.

Adding users to groups

At present, to add a user to a group, you have to:

• find the relevant user;
• view their profile page; and
• then add/invite them to the group.

This is only possible if the group is an invite only or controlled group.

 

We have several thoughts on how this could be improved:

Add Members page
Add a new page to the Group page to allow admins to add new members.
This would mean that a somoene administering a group could complete the workflow without switching to the user context.
This seems to be relatively simple to implement and, in my opinion, would improve the workflow for group admins.

Friend Search Results On the 'Find Friends' and 'My Friends' results pages, add some kind of drop-down list to add a user to a group without viewing the users' profile page.

Membership Modes

We were also wondering whether it would make sense for users of a group in 'Open Membership' mode to be able to invite their friends to the group?

General

Another idea raised is that when a group is removed, users within that group are not notified. We were wondering whether there's any objection to a notification to all users of the group when it is deleted?

23 November 2009, 12:11

Another issue:

When the group is "Invite only" or "Controlled membership", it is still listed in search results. Is there any good reason why such groups should be listed in search results? I think that those groups which user can't send a membership request to or add oneself either should not be listed in search at all, or be listed only if "Publicly Viewable Group" is set to Yes.

23 November 2009, 18:09

I think the answer to this depends on what ultimately happens to group types and join types. If they remain separate, then your idea has some sense. If not, you might need to think harder about which are displayed and which are not.

One thing is for sure though - the search, ordered alphabetically, is useless . Would be great if there was a better algorithm for displaying relevant groups. 

23 November 2009, 18:06

These thoughts all sound good, and in fact Richard and I have talked about them many times. For example, we began to question the separation of group types and join types recently, and further back many people had suggested that there was a page where you could mass add people to a group (the feature request tracker will have an entry for this).

Ray Merrill also suggested that the process of creating a group could be wizard-ified a bit - step one, enter group details, step two, choose users to add.

I'll leave commenting about the specifics to Richard, but these are all good thoughts and I'm sure Mahara will be better off if they're implemented  

02 December 2009, 0:58

Yes!  Quite a few people would thank you for a way to mass add/invite people to groups, and I like the idea of a single click to invite/add from the find friends page too.

We recently added a 'groupmessage' notification type that you might find useful if you are going to implement the deleted group notifications.

02 December 2009, 6:12

Hi!

i'm not able to find a button for send messages to all members of a group... Exist this button?

Thanks!

02 December 2009, 11:02

Hi Nicola,

No, there is not such button.  A workaround could be to use the forums to send all members a message.

HTH Heinz

02 December 2009, 12:20

Hi Heinz,

quoting Richard "We recently added a 'groupmessage' notification type that you might find useful if you are going to implement the deleted group notifications."  i have verified and in 1.2 exist that function, but without a button for sending mass-messages, what use could have?

Sorry for my poor english...

02 December 2009, 16:50

Hi Nicola,

I added that groupmessage notification type internally because it was useful for implementing the "submit view to group" notifications.

I did it that way because I thought it would be useful for other things later, but no one has got around to adding a group message button yet.

03 December 2009, 10:21

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your input. We've published our changes to out git repository (http://git.luns.net.uk/mahara.git) on the group_membership branch. The commits on the branch include:

• abstracting existing group invitation functionality;
• a new add members page to add users to a group from within the group interface rather than switching to the user/friend context; and;
• adding a new area to the friend results page for adding and removing users to groups.

The new interface features can be taken together or independently, but the group invitation abstraction is required by both.

We've tried to limit the number of page reloads within the interface by using javascript and json pages to make the interface as fast and thereby as usable as possible.

Any feedback on our changes would be gratefully appreciated.

Cheers,

Andrew