Author

Michael JasonSmith

Contact

Michael JasonSmith <mpj17@onlinegroups.net>

Date

2014-11-13

Organization

GroupServer.org

Copyright

This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License by OnlineGroups.net.

This product supplies the core code to support announcement groups in GroupServer. These groups differ from standard discussion groups in two main ways: they have different posting rules and the group page is different. The announcement group code is enabled by changing the marker interface.

The main way that an announcement group differs from a discussion group is that there is a small set of posting members who are the only ones that can post. The announcement group provides a can-post rule¹ to restrict posting to just the posting members. This rule is enforced by gs.group.type.announcement.canpostrules.PostingMember.

The list of posting members is implemented as a list of user identifiers, on the mailing list instance, named posting_members. If this property is absent, or if it is empty, then all group members can post. The list of posting members is set by Manage Members².

Because an announcement group only has a few posting members the topics matter less than the fact that someone posted at all. As a result the Group page is altered to emphasise the posts, rather than the topics:

• The Topics tab and its associated JavaScript is hidden ³,
• The standard Posts Summary tab is hidden⁴,
• A new Posts tab is shown, which looks more like the standard topics tab.

A group is turned into an announcement group by changing the marker interface for the group folder to IGSAnnouncementGroup. This marker interface has the following inheritance tree:

gs.group.base.interfaces.IGSGroupMarker
    △
    │
gs.group.type.discussion.interfaces.IGSDiscussionGroup
    △
    │
gs.group.type.announcement.interfaces.IGSAnnouncementGroup

• Translations: https://www.transifex.com/groupserver/gs-group-type-announcement/
• Code repository: https://github.com/groupserver/gs.group.type.announcement
• Questions and comments to http://groupserver.org/groups/development
• Report bugs at https://redmine.iopen.net/projects/groupserver