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 subset of community members a (public or private) space to have discussions about a topic that doesn't necessarily fit in an existing Category.
- Create Events to showcase in your community Categories and Groups.
This article:
- describes how to enable the addon,
- provides an overview of the functionality that will be available with each after the addon is enabled, and
- includes links to KB articles that have 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 display in your top-level navigation.
📝 NOTE: This may not be the case if you have a customized theme, in which case you might have 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 subset of your community a self-contained public or private space — outside the existing Category structure — in which to have limited-participation discussions on a specialized or focused topic.
⚠️ IMPORTANT: If you enable Groups to accommodate limited-participation discussions in your community, review the permissions information in Roles & Permissions, Infrastructure Categories in order to prevent unintended view access.
- A set of Group-specific permissions is included so that you can decide who can create and manage Groups (e.g., restricting group creation to only trusted members or moderators).
- The standard set of discussion features are available in Group posts, like the Rich Editor, Reactions, and comments.
- Groups include announcements, all post types (questions, polls, etc.), an events list, and leaders who manage the Group. You can control who can see the Group and how users can join (freely, by application, or by invitation).
- All Administrators and Moderators with the permission
Garden > Moderation > Manage can moderate Groups.
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
