03. Organic Groups Terms, Definitions - backdrop-contrib/og GitHub Wiki

TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

  • GROUP: A single node which can have different content types and users associated with it.
  • GROUP CONTENT: Content such as nodes or users, which are associated with a group.
  • GROUP ADMIN: Is a privileged user with permission to administer particular activities within a group.
  • SITE ADMIN: Compared to group admin, a site admin is granted access to all groups operating within a site. The site admin can specify the permissions group admins are granted in order to control their group related activities, while keeping other permissions out of their reach.
  • GROUP CONTEXT: Whenever an individual piece of content such as a node or a user is viewed, the module attempts to determine if the content is associated with a particular group. The group context is later on used to determine which access rights the user is granted. For example, in a particular group context the user can edit nodes, but is only allowed to view the nodes in a different group context. The group context can also be used by custom modules to determine different behaviors. For example, displaying different blocks on different groups, switching to a different theme, etc.
  • ENTITY: Nodes, users, and taxonomy terms, are examples of Backdrop entities. Organic Groups allows each individual Backdrop entity type to be associated with a group or with a group content. This means that you can associate different users (as group content) to a certain user (as a group).
  • BUNDLE: Bundles are specific entity types combined with fields. Specific content types (page, post, event, or product) are bundles as are comment types or file types.

GROUP ARCHITECTURE

At the lowest level the module associates content types with groups. Above this level is the role and permissions layer, which operates at the group level. The Organic Groups module leverages Backdrop's core functionality, especially the field API. This means that a content type is associated with a group, by setting the correct field value.

Users are also allowed to select the groups that will be associated with the content from a list of groups, which they have authorization to view. As is the case with Backdrop itself, in Organic Groups different permissions can be assigned to different user roles. This allows group members to perform a different set of actions, in different group contexts.