The Groups and Events addon allows you to:
- Create Groups to enable users to form and manage their own discussion groups. These Groups are designed to give a smaller subset of your community a (public or private) space to have discussions about a particular topic that doesn't necessarily fit in an existing Category.
- Create Events to showcase in your community Categories and Groups.
This article focuses on how to enable the Groups and Events addon, along with a brief overview of each. Refer to the Create & Manage Events and Create & Manage Groups articles for more detailed information about each feature.
Enable Groups and Events
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings > Addons > Addons.
- Click the Groups and Events toggle to turn it ON.
After enabling the addon, the Groups option will appear in your top-level navigation.
📝 NOTE: This may not be the case if you have a customized theme, and you’ll need to navigate directly to the URL /groups
from your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community domain (e.g., yoursite.vanillaforums.com/groups
).
Groups overview
- Groups are designed to give a smaller subset of your community a self-contained public or private space to have discussions outside the existing Category structure (typically to discuss a more specialized or focused topic).
- A set of Group-specific permissions are included, allowing you to decide who can create and manage Groups (e.g., restricting group creation to only trusted members or moderators).
- Typical discussion features are available in Group posts, like the Rich Editor, Reactions, and comments.
- Groups include announcements, all discussions types (questions, polls, etc.), an events list, and leaders who manage the Group. You can control not only who can see the Group but also how users can join: freely, by application, or by invitation.
- All Administrators and Moderations with the permission
Garden > Moderation > Manage
can moderate Groups as well.
Learn more
Events overview
The Groups and Events addon provides the following Event functionality, allowing your organization to:
- Create Events in a Category or within a Group
- View Events in your Categories or within a Group
- RSVP to an Event
- Display upcoming Events in a widget that's located on the Recent Discussions and All Categories pages, as well as on individual Category pages.
Learn more