Groups and Events

The Groups and Events addon allows you to:

Create Groups, which are member-driven "micro-communities" within your larger Vanilla community. They provide focused spaces where members can connect around shared interests, roles, or projects, enabling more intimate and targeted conversations outside your main public discussions.
Create Events to showcase in your community Categories and Groups, allowing your organization to promote its upcoming events.

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 discussions on a specialized or focused topic.

IMPORTANT: If you enable Groups, review the permissions information in Roles & Permissions, Infrastructure Categories in order to prevent unintended view access.

Also review the Group-based permissions in the Permissions > Groups section of that article to learn about each available Group permission.

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.