Hubzero 2.4

Hub users

Groups

A group is a community you build inside the hub: a place to share content and conversation, privately or with the world. Every group has an address of its own at /groups/<group ID>, a member list, and a set of tabs — a forum, a wiki, a blog, a calendar, files, and more — that the group's managers switch on or off.

People make groups when a body of work outlasts a mailing list. A soil carbon project spread over four institutions puts its sampling protocols on a group page, argues about the analysis pipeline in a forum thread that is still findable next year, and keeps the papers it produced on a Citations tab it can hand to the funder. None of that needs an administrator: any member can start a group, and the tabs are switches the group's own managers turn on. This chapter follows that group, soilcarbon, from creation onward.

Three things called a group

Hubs have three arrangements that sound alike and do quite different jobs.

  • A group is what this chapter is about: a space members create and run themselves, with its own pages, forum, files and membership. You join one, or are invited to it.
  • A project is a workspace for a small team preparing files and data before any of it is released. Its owner picks the team and decides whether anyone else ever sees it. It is about work in progress rather than community: there is no forum and no wiki, and nobody asks to join.
  • An access group is one of the hub's permission buckets, set by administrators, which decides what you are allowed to do on the hub at all. You cannot see it, join it, or make one.

A group's roles and permissions stop at the group's edge, and no combination of them makes you an administrator. Your access group can decide whether you are allowed to create a group at all, but being in one puts you in no group, and joining a group changes nothing about your access group.

Groups start at /groups. What you see there depends on whether you are signed in:

Section What it lists
Group Invites Groups that have invited you. Only when you have some
Group Requests Membership requests of yours still awaiting approval
My Groups Groups you belong to
Groups Matching My Interests Groups whose tags match the interests on your profile
Popular Groups The three groups with the most members
Featured Groups Groups the hub's administrators picked out

Browse available groups opens the full list at /groups/browse. Search it by title, sort by Group Title or Group Alias, and filter by State (Active or Archived) and Policy (Open, Restricted, Invite Only, Closed). Hidden groups never appear, in the list or in search results.

Joining a group

Joining is what gets you the tabs a group has kept to itself. Most groups leave Overview readable by anyone and shut everything interesting — files, forum, wiki — to members, so a group can look almost empty from outside and be busy within.

Open a group and use the button at the top of its sidebar. What the button offers depends on the group's join policy:

Policy What you can do
Open/Anyone Join Group adds you immediately
Restricted Request Group Membership opens a form. Explain who you are and why you should be admitted, then select Send Request. A manager approves or denies it, and the button then reads Request Pending Approval
Invite Only Nothing. The sidebar says Group is Invite Only
Closed Nothing. The sidebar says Group Closed

A restricted group may show its own Credentials text on the request form, telling you what the managers want to see — a project number, a principal investigator, and so on.

If you have been invited, the sidebar offers Accept Invitation and Decline Invitation instead.

Once you are a member the button becomes a Group Member menu, whose Cancel Group Membership entry leaves the group. A manager who is the only manager left cannot leave; promote someone else first.

The group page

Every group page has the same frame:

  • The group's logo at the top of the sidebar, linking back to the group's home page.
  • The membership button or the Group Member / Group Manager menu.
  • The tab menu — one entry per plugin the group has switched on, starting with Overview.
  • The group's join policy, discoverability and creation date beneath the menu.

Overview is the group's home page. Out of the box it shows About the Group, built from whatever fields the hub's administrators defined, and a preview of Group Members. A manager can replace it with a page of their own; see Customization.

The tabs

Each tab comes from a plugin in core/plugins/groups. These ship with Hubzero 2.4:

Tab What it provides
Activity A feed of what has happened in the group
Announcements Notices from the managers, which can be made sticky and given a publish window
Blog The group's blog, with posts, comments and an archive
Calendar The group's events, with download and subscription links
Citations Publications produced by the group or its members. See Group citations
Collections Boards of collected posts — links, files, images and text
Courses Courses the group runs
Files The group's shared file space
Forum Discussions, in sections and categories. See Group forum
Members The member directory, and where managers run membership. See Member functions
Messages Messages sent to the group or to a subset of its members
Projects Projects owned by the group
Resources Resources contributed under the group's name
Usage Counts of the group's pages, members, resources, discussions, wiki pages, blog posts and events
Wiki The group's wiki
Wish List Requests and suggestions members vote on

Two more plugins ship without a tab of their own: Member Options stores each member's per-group email preferences, and Search keeps the group's content in the hub's search index.

A manager sets each tab to Any HUB Visitor, Registered HUB Users, Group Members Only or Disabled/Off. A tab set to Disabled/Off disappears from the menu. Overview cannot be turned off.

In this chapter

Administrators run groups from a different screen; see Groups in the managers book.

Rewritten and checked against 2.4-main @ 42a7a5b5c7 on 2026-09-10.