Hi John Welcome!

have you read our codex primer on how usergroups/permissions work?

http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/getting-started/controlling-access/

also you might read some docs a user put together… http://ernohannink.com/membership-program-with-a-forum-wordpress-and-simplepress/  scroll down to bottom for couple of downloadable pdf files…

and of course, if you have any questions, we can try to help here…

HI Mr. Papa, yes I have read that and I must be dense. I’m just not catching it.

I must be missing something simple. It seems like I have been clicking settings for hours and nothing on the form page changes: http://www.aquariumcarebasics.com/forum/

I’ve made Groups and Forums but I’ll I see on the forum page is “The requested group does not exist or you do not have permission to view it”. And this is all I see even when I log in as Administrator.

If someone can walk me though something simple like setting it up so people who visit the page can see these groups and forums, I will catch on I’m sure.

Please help!

John T

Duh, I think I’m getting it!

John T

what are you changing?  perhaps you are confusing groups and usergroups?

groups are containers of forums…  forums contain subforums or topics… topics contain posts…

usergroups are containers of users…

to display content on your site, you need to create at least one group and one forum…  this is done on simple press forums admin panels…

then for each forum you have created, you can define access and permissions for that forum…  you have a set of defined permission sets… this controls the access rules…  things like view forum, create topics, reply to posts, etc…  permissions are defined on simple press permissions admin panels…

usergroups are a grouping of users that you want to have a common set of permissions and accesses on a forum…  you can control the memberships in a usergroup on the simple press usergroups admin panels…

based on what I see, you have not created any groups and forums yet… but its possible you have just have set permissions such that guests cannot see the groups and forums…

to control access and permissions for users on forums, you take a usergroup and a permission and apply it to a forum…  this is done when the forum is created of by editing the forum…  there are also tools for globally applying to all forums or all forums within a group…

hope that helps…

if not, lets start at the top and tell me what groups and forums you have created?

I think what is throwing me off is the hierarchy of User Groups. If I go to AddGroupPermission > Select Usergroup > Guests for example, that gives Guests certain permissions…but does that automatically add Moderators and User Groups higher up the chain? Or do I need to add higher User Groups manually?

In other words, by selecting a UserGroup, does that establish the lowest in the chain, and everything above in the chain gets added automatically?

Also, is there a master table where I can quickly review all of the UserGroups assigned to alll of the Groups and Forums?

Hope this makes sense!!!

John T

no, there is no dependency/problem-with-post-edit-buttonierarchy between usergroups… they are distinct entities…  users can belong to mulitple usergroups…

a usergroup is just a way to give a set of users a common set of permissions…

so say you wanted to give guests read access to forum X…   you would edit forum X and apply the guests usergroup with the read only permission set….  this would allow any guest to only read the forum…

now lets say you have a general usergroup for any registered members called members…  and you wanted to allow members to have standard access to forum X…  you would edit forum X and apply the members usergroup with the standard access permission set…  now members would be able to create topics and posts…

now you want to have a set of moderators on forum X… so you would add the desired users you want to have moderator access to moderator usergroup…  you would edit forum X and apply the moderator usergroup with the moderator permissions… now those select users you put in the moderators usergroup would have moderator permissions on forum X…

now what happens if a user is a member of members and moderators?  easy – the best permission wins out…  the permissions are essentially OR’red together…  if either permission set grants a permission, the user gets it…  that is sort of the hierarchy you referred too…

of course, you can  have an unlimited number of usergroups and permission sets… we have supplied a few default ones for you to use – and for most users that is enough…  but, for example, if you wanted to have a different set of moderators for each forum, you would just have to create a unique moderator usergroup for each forum and put the desired users in each…

on the forum – forums – manage usergroups and forums, you can pretty easily see the usergroups/permission sets applied to each forum…

also, when you create or edit a group, you can set up a default set of permissions that will get applied to each forum you create within that group…  those settings only apply to new forums… any current forums will need to be manually set up… as mentioned though, there is a tool for creating a new permissions and applying it to all forums within a group…