I have been doing additional work on our church web site, and have been frustrated by the lack of support for user groups. For the members section of the site I would like to have a dedicated section for various co-worker groups and have their posts automatically show up in the right section.

Here’s what I’d like to do:

• Users can be members of one or more groups
• Users can write posts only to categories owned by the group(s) to which they belong. If they are a member of only one group, their posts automatically show up in the right category.
• Posts can (optionally) be restricted to be visible only to group members
• All of this should work with both posts and pages

The purpose of this is to create a private space for various ministry teams and leaders to have their own discussion. Ideally, when they enter the site they would see a series of titles of the latest posts in the group(s) to which they belong.

Wordpress does work pretty well as a CMS, as long as you give editing privileges to a small number of trusted people. But since they can post anywhere, you don’t really want too many people working on it. Inevitably posts will show up in the wrong category, and pages will not be in the correct section. Wordpress does not lend itself very well to managing people as groups. Existing plugins do not really meet this need. Two of the best are:

• Viewlevel lets you restrict viewing of posts to users above a certain level. But it does not let you restrict which categories users can post to, nor does it let you create a number of separate groups at the same level. One advantage of viewlevel over the others is that it lets you restrict access to pages, not just posts. This is essential in a CMS application. I currently use viewlevel to restrict pages in the members section to logged in users. Viewlevel has not yet been updated to take advantage of Wordpress capabilities.
• Post restrictions uses role capabilities to control who can see which posts. This is a step in the right direction, but it does not restrict where you can post, and it presents the entire list of capabilities as choices for setting restrictions. This could be very confusing if there are a lot of people using the site. It would be must better to present only a list of user groups. It also does not work with pages.

It is possible to make use of roles and capabilities to create pseudo-user groups, but Wordpress still lacks support for true user groups. For our public church web site this might be alright, since there are only a few people who really need to be authorized to make changes, but for the more collaborative environment that I would like to have in the members section I may need to consider another CMS package. Either that or hack together my own plugin based on the excellent work already done by others. When I have some spare time. Right.

Update: Here is a list of plugins that restrict posting/viewing in a number of ways.