Is it possible to display a module of users that belong to a specific role?
I have a prospect who wants to group users by user role. There would basically be 5 major roles that users would be long to and they would only see the content that those roles have access to. They're attracted to social groups primarily because of the fact that it has a module of who are the members of that group.
Overall for their use case and for Vanilla's long term sanity I think their best bet is to to pass roles via SSO and then the category permissions would determine which categories those users could interact with.
This client is very interested in a custom theme done by Vanilla therefore imagine this scenario from that perspective.
Would it be possible to display a widget/module of users that belong to a certain role only in certain categories? . Does the data exist? Can it be displayed via theming in such a way and can it be done in a scalable way?
Comments
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Vanilla can show content based on a permission right in theme with a smarty hook:
https://docs.vanillaforums.com/developer/smarty/conditionals/#conditional-checkpermission
Content by roles can be done in a custom theme , via a theme hook
https://staff.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/703/#Comment_703
The promoted content module also has some flexibility based on role or rank.
https://blog.vanillaforums.com/product/friday-theme-tip-promoted-content-module
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The content/data here that they want to display is the users that belong to a specific role. Let's say in the panel. Not posts.
Basically, imagine if this social group member list was displayed in the category called "Graphic Artists" and the avatars that would display would be everyone that has the Graphic Artists role (that was passed via SSO).
Is the data associated with all the users that belong to a particular role in a community something that can be displayed visually in a theme with our pro-services?
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Showing the specific people, sounds possible, but I would recommend you to go to estimates - they may have already estimated on this.
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What you're describing is VERY similar to what we have with groups now, is there any reason they don't want to fallback to an existing feature?
If they definitely don't want to fallback to groups I guess what could be achieved from what they want is:
- A module on the panel that display users with the same roles as the current user: (I'd say this is a custom plugin, with a module designed similar to "Who's online". The amount of roles to "scan" for would be limited, and the number of user's photos displaying too).
- A module on the homepage that displays content (discussions/comments) by user's with the same roles as the current user: (This can be achieved by adding the promoted content module to their theme, it can be done either in a custom theme, the amount of roles to "scan" for would be limited).
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I don't want them to fallback to groups because of other complications that it will result in. This will be the main experience of their users in the community and the main experience can't be only in the social groups or I think we're going to run into issues longer term because it's half baked compared to the rest of the Vanilla platform.
Sounds like this is possible to display a module of the users that belong to a specific role only in specific categories through a custom theme + custom plugin.
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@BrendanParm We have a built in module that can be placed in a custom theme that displays the Moderators for a particular category. Unfortunately it can't easily be configured for custom roles, that would have to be done as a service.
I know iEarn had some setup for it, although I'm not sure if they are using it anymore.
Update
ZTE uses it.
I think the new Asus theme is using it as well.
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