Hi, I've played with joomla for a while (standard sites with static content), so I consider myself a newbie for advanced issues such this one...

I want to create a website for a dancing school, where people should be able to register and -in the same registration form- they should be able to select which group to join (e.g. "Beginners, Tuesday evening", or "Intermediate, Wednesday evening").

My idea was to have a sort of "social" website, so that people subscribed to the classes could know/instant message each other also outside the lessons.

Also I wanted to have something in the backend to make it easier for the administration, e.g. have a checkbox for each user to show if he/she paid, and all the data (address, mobile phone etc.). A really nice feature I'm looking for is some CRM to manage the users, so that the admin could write notes about the clients (e.g. if somebody was missing a lesson, or paid only the half of the course or other notes an admin could want to keep about his/her customers).

I've tried community builder 1.1 (on joomla 1.0.13) and added a custom field with a dropdown list of available classes. But I haven't seen a possibility to associate that choice to a group.

Community Builder doesn't seem to support groups besides the joomla "levels": registered, author, publisher etc.

Thus installed group jive + plugin for community builder, but it doesn't seem to be possible to achieve what I want. People should first register, then join a group.

Maybe what I want to achieve must be done in 2 steps:

1. registration
2. join the group (group jive)

Maybe someone has more experiences in websites with groups and can suggest me something? That would be very welcome.

Thank you in advance

--firepol

maybe i've found a way: i added an extra field in the profile, where the user can select a value, in my case each value is a group.

i've created a users list so that every list filters users for that value, e.g. group EQUAL "Wednesday evening".

Now I'm thinking that a nice to have would be an admin component to administer the users.

Would you help me to create such an admin component? I'm quite new to joomla but I know some PHP and I would really like to learn to create joomla addons.

Thanks for letting me know, in the meanwhile I'll take a look at the joomla development docs...

I answer a private message I received in the forum, so eventually others can benefit from it...

I saw your post on trying to creating groups for your community builder component. I was wondering if you were successfully or had a good way of doing it? The site I'm developing is family based so I want to have a "pictorial" that shows each member and their family. So I would like to have groups based on the family name and then have the members (father, spouse, daughter, son) as users under that group. At then end of the day I want a user list that when you first go to it the list shows all the families. If you click on the family name it will show all the family members as users under that name.

I hope that makes sense. I will try your website also and see if that helps.

thanks

What you can do is to try group jive , which is the faster solution, on my opinion, to solve your issue (even if family based it seems complex, as you need subgroups if I've understood well).

For the salsa school website I'm creating at the moment I just added a field (dropdown selection) where a user selects which course he/she wants to subscribe. Then I must create a custom member list for each course. Actually I have 6 courses, so I must manually create 6 groups, which is not really the best solution, in fact I'm considering to use group jive as well. Anyway, there won't be so many groups, so maybe I'll just do a list and try to find a way to copy it (export/import SQL) instead of creating manually ther other 5 lists

The advantage of group jive is that it has several permissions and it's possible to create categories and groups.

Disadvantage is that at registration you cannot add yourself directly to a group. Maybe with a CB plugin that would be possible. If somebody knows how to do that, let me know...

I'll try to write a new post asking how to add something like this to the registration page (with a plugin).