Creating and editing project groups and categories

Help for domain administration: Index


What are project groups and categories?

A project group is set of projects grouped together for administrative purposes. As the Domain Administrator, you define the basis upon which project groups are created. You can elect to group projects by technologies, by departments, by clients--or by any other criteria your development environment may require. Regardless of how you set up your project groups, any given project on you site may belong to more than one project group.

Project groups enable you to perform administrative actions to affect multiple projects and users simultaneously. User membership in project groups can happen two different ways:

  1. When the projects a user belongs to are added to the project group.

  2. When users are associated with user groups you have created and then added to the project group. You can read more about this in Creating and editing user groups.

The "project categories" listed on your Start Page are special kinds of project groups. Categories enable projects on this site to be cataloged publicly by development type as a way of organizing project information for browsing. Because project groups are an administrative feature, they are not visible to site users, but project categories appear on every user's Start Page and in the Hosted Projects page. The Project Group Add screen lets you choose whether to make a new project group be an administrative group or a public category. See Editing project groups for more information about this.

Both project groups and categories can be managed as projects themselves as an administrative feature. Like individual hosted projects, every project group/category has its own home page, CVS repository, issue tracker, and web pages for news, file uploads/downloads, and project documentation.


About default project groups

There are already two existing project groups for this site:

All projects created on this site automatically belong to one or both of these groups. If you want to special modifications changes across multiple projects, you must create your own additional project groups. These groups become subsets of one or both of these default project groups, which cannot be edited.

Continue through this document to follow the examples of how to create project groups and make changes across multiple projects within that group. In the Creating project groups section, the hypothetical example shows creating a project group for all the projects in your domain that are using contract content contributors. In the Managing user group roles for project groups section, the example assigns the "content developer" role to a certain user group that belongs to the contract project group.


Creating project groups

To create a project group:

Input fields:

Group Name
Choose a one-word name to identify this new group. Do not use spaces in the name. Example: contractprojects

Summary
Use the summary description field to include a few qualifying words about the nature of the group. Information in this field is included in the Project Group Add screen where all project groups are listed. Example: projects using contractors

Description
This text box enables you to include further detail about the project group. Example: Several projects require outsourcing to handle content development. Any projects using independent contractors must be tracked separately for cost accounting purposes.

Category
Check this box to make the newly created project group a category. A category is a unique kind of project group for organizing how project listings appear on the Start Page and Hosted Projects page. Each category has a category home page listing all projects associated with it. The default categories on this site group projects by types of applications being developed, i.e. communication, education, games, etc., but you may wish to categorize projects differently. Both categories and project groups may be edited; see the following Editing project groups section for more information.

Initial Projects
List the projects you wish to include in this group. Identify projects by their one-word names, one entry per line. These projects become elements of the project group you are creating.

When you are finishing entering project group information, click the Create Group button to submit the new group. The All Project Groups page displays with the new group included.


Editing project groups

You can modify project group information through the Project Group Edit screen. This is also the page you must use to add users or user groups to a project group, and to assign or modify the roles of those users.

To access the Project Group Edit screen:

This screen contains three sections containing separate editing actions that affect the project group. The top and middle sections are explained here. The bottom section of the Project Group Edit screen is covered in Managing user group roles in project groups.

In the first section of the Project Group Edit page, you can modify the summary and description fields, then use the Submit Changes button to save your changes.

The middle "Group Elements" section of the page displays those projects that are included in this project group. Elements refer to the individual projects that make up the project group. Here you can:


Adding user groups to project groups

To add one or more user groups to a project group:


Managing user groups and roles for project groups

To view and modify user group roles for project groups:


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