Currently you can only assign field groups to cck fields created on a content type. I want to be able to assign a field group to all the standard items (title, description and taxonomy) so as to group them together.
Is there a way to do this without doing a form_alter?
I wasn't sure about this, so I skimmed the sourcecode. It looks like fieldgroup.module is CCK field specific. One clear example of this is in the fieldgroup_view_group() function. form_alter is probably the way to go. It's worth keeping in mind that the form alteration won't show up on field ordering interface.