ExpressionEngine Multiple Site Manager and Member Groups

Question

I’m looking for some links to further info on how EE handles Member Groups in relation to the MSM.

In my case, I have two membership sites. Generally speaking, the two sites serve the same overall group of people, so the fact that the MSM shares the member database works in my favor. What I’m unclear about is how to manage the varying combination of access levels, ie:

1. Member of Site A but not B
2. Member of Site B but not A
3. Member of Site A and Site B

Since, as I’ve read in other forum posts, you cannot assign a member to belong to multiple groups, I’d apparently have to create 3 member groups in the above configuration and assign users accordingly. At least in the templates I can check for membership to group 1|3… right?

We’re planning on further dividing our membership to varying levels of access within a single site.

For example,

1. Full access to Site A
2. Access to a single month’s content of Site A
3. Access to a single month’s content + web tools

If I have to create groups that manage each combination of the above, in addition to access to Site B’s access levels, this will quickly grow to be unusable.

It’s starting to sound like I’ll have to use custom PHP code directly in the templates to manage my access levels outside of EE.

Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing?

Would it be best to not use the MSM at all and just manage each site as an individual installation, with separate member groups? ( that would defeat a some of the reason for using EE in the first place for me, ie sharing of weblog content between sites )

Links to external resources or the documentation would be helpful. ( yes, I did check the docs first, but may have missed something.. wink )

Thanks!

Answer 1

Your membership database would span across both sites, so there would not be an instance of a user being a member of site A and not site B - by registering on either site, their account is created for all other partner sites.

Membership groups can have per site preferences - so a group could have higher privileges on site A than they do on site B. This also allows you to setup a different default group for newly registered users, depending on which site they register on.

You are correct concerning EE's one group per member - so you will have a variety of groups built. EE 2.0 is coming soon though, unfortunately I have not reviewed all of its features, but you may want to see if it will support multiple groups per member.