Group categories is an important tool for your site. Every group that is created on the site needs to be associated with a category. A category defines the characteristics of a group. To access the Group Categories area, you will need to click on the Groups on the sidebar menu and click on the Categories menu beneath it.
To edit or create a Group Category, click on the specific links. The settings for a group category can be broken down into 3 different segments:
General
General information about the group category including avatar.Custom Fields
This determines what fields are requested from the user when the user creates a new group under the selected category. This is a really powerful tool as it allows you to request different fields from different categories.Access
EasySocial also associates access with the group categories. You may define the access control for a category in this section.
General
In this section, you will be able to set the general settings for a group category as shown in the figure below:
The settings above are broken down into the following:
Avatar
Set a different avatar picture for each of your group categories.Title
Set the title of your group. Example:Businesses,Automobile,Programmers Land,Job Seekers,Fan Clubs.Alias
This is used for linkage when user accesses a group on the front end. It should be as simple possible. You may leave this blank if you do not intend to have a customized alias.Description
Describes about the category. This description will be visible to the user on the front end when they are viewing the group category.Published
Determines whether this category should be published or not. Only published categories are displayed on the front end.
Custom Fields
Custom fields in a Group Category is an important tool. It allows you to customize the behavior of the group creation, editing process.
Example: There are cases where you may request additional fields for the category Businesses and may want to request different fields for the category Automobile.
Custom fields for Group Category can be broken down into the following sections:
Step
A step is simply just a page. It allows you to create custom workflows during group creation / editing and displaying of the group information.Fields
Fields on the other hand are smaller parts that forms up the form on the page.
Step
To create a new step, simply click on the icon highlighted on the diagram below:
Upon clicking on the icon above, you will now notice that a new page is added on the form as you can see on the figure below. To edit the characteristics of a step, click on the Edit button.
Once you are done configuring the step, you can now start to drag & drop custom fields you see on the right into the page as shown on the diagram below:
Fields
To add custom fields into your page, all you need to do is to drag and drop the custom fields from the Field Browser and drop it under the canvas area as shown in the figure below:
Upon adding the field on the page, a sample of how the field looks like would be displayed in the canvas. clicking on the field will then display a settings form which allows you to configure the behavior of the custom field.
The configuration of each custom field type varies depending on the developer that developed the custom fields. However, these are the standard configurations that are added by EasySocial by default:
Core Tab
Title
This will be used as the title in the form.
Description
This will be used as the instructions on the field.
Show Title
Determines if the title should be visible on the field.
Show Description
Determines if the instruction should be visible on the field.
Default Value
This will automatically be populated into the field.
Required
Determines if this field is required when creating or editing a group. If this option is enabled, user must enter values for this field.
View Tab
Appear During Registration
This determines if the field should appear during group creation.
Appear During Editing
This determines if the field should appear when user edits their group.
Appear During Displaying
This determines if the field should appear in the group's information page.
Advanced Tab
Unique Key
This is not often used but it can be used by 3rd party extensions or developers to retrieve a value of the custom field.
Searchable
Determines if this field should be searchable by users.
Access
Groups that are from the category will inherit the access rules defined in the category. The Access area defines the limits or restrictions in the group.
