In my opinion, it's not easy unless b2 gets the category permission control just as the collection permission control.

OK, thanks. Like I said, I've not had chance to poke into it on my local install. One to look at when I get home maybe.

@chris_of_arabia @haharen I agree. In order to keep private threads without the pain to control each post individually, having per-category visibility (Public, Members, Community, etc) would be a good option.

Ideal solution, be able to grant access to categories according to the user group.

Let's mark this as a request.

Regards.

Thanks @mgsolipa. I'll keep an eye out for further developments.

@mgsolipa
Yes , it's really useful in the situation which needs further set the user permissions under a collection, such as a forum.

Right now the best way to approach this would be to have different forums for different user groups.

I am not sure that adding yet another complexity layer on the permission system would be a good idea.

Maybe it would be smarter to work on/with the aggregation capabilities of b2evolution.

Do we agree that all we would need here is to have a home page that lists all available forums to a user, but beneath that, as soon as he digs into a forum it would actually be in a different collection.

I'll see if I can get an answer to that @fplanque.

@fplanque
It's really hard to answer.

In webmaster cases, I think they would like to choose the permission of category more than a aggregate collection. The direct and simple reason is that if they choose the former, they can get everything control under one collection. But if they choose the aggregation, they would create and set several collections. Firstly, they should set more options; Secondly, among the jumping of each collection, some users may get puzzled by the different surfaces and directories.In the aggregate collection, it contains all urls of sub-collections for users to choose, but when they jump into a sub-collection, they can't find the relationship with the main and other sub-collections.So the webmaster would have more works to build the relevance between these collections. I have some sugesstions:

1. Open a new window when click the link(url) which points to another collection(website);
2. Add some relevance info(maybe a widget?) in one collection when it gets the relationship with other collections ;
3. Aggregate categories in Forum Skin(In the blog skin, we can use the category widget.).

Although the permission of categories may be powerful, it will change lots of codes(I guess.So big changes just like inserting a huge section above the post permission and under the collection permission). Except considering the complexity,I am more concerned about the impact on running performance.I am not sure how much it would be, if too much, then I think it is the loss outweighs the gain.

However If we add this feature and no much impact to running performance, it's really powerful. The aggregat collection and permission of category are two different features. They may be used in different users' needs.