Groups

What is Groups?

The Groups plugin for WordPress is an essential tool that helps you organize users on your website. Think of it like sorting people into different clubs or teams, where each club has its own set of rules about who can access and do what.

Why use it?

This plugin is very useful if you want to control who can see certain content or perform specific actions on your website. It helps you to keep some parts of your website exclusive to specific groups or to give special rights to some users.

Groups works great with WooCommerce, so you can make some products only available to members of certain groups.

What it Does

It allows you to create groups, assign users to these groups, and set permissions for what each group can do or see on your site.

Ease of Use

The Groups plugin works within the familiar WordPress Dashboard, so you do not need to learn something completely new. Clean views and clear functions make it quick and easy to work with.

Control Content

You can make parts of your website visible to members of specific groups only, which is great for managing exclusive areas and products. You can protect whole pages, products and other types of content. You can also protect sections within pages.

Control Permissions

Define what actions users in particular groups can perform, based on standard WordPress capabilities and custom capabilities provided by plugins.

In a Nutshell

The Groups plugin makes managing your WordPress site easier, especially if you need to control who can do what or see what. It is designed to be easy to use, reducing the complexity of user management and content access.

Key Features

Membership Management

You can put users into different groups, similar to assigning them to different classes or teams.

Content Access Control

You can decide that only specific groups can see certain content, posts, pages or products. If you are not in the right group, you will not see that protected content.

Capabilities

You can assign special rights to users based on which group they are a member of.

Comprehensive Features

Groups is powerful and effective, yet simple and easy to use. While its flexibility covers a wide range of functions, some of the most commonly used aspects include:

User groups

Supports an unlimited number of groups
Provides a Registered group which is automatically maintained
Users can be assigned to any group
Users are added automatically to the Registered group

Groups hierarchy

Supports group hierarchies with capability inheritance

Group capabilities

Integrates standard WordPress capabilities which can be assigned to groups and users
Supports custom capabilities: allows to define new capabilities for usage in plugins and web applications
Users inherit capabilities of the groups they belong to
Groups inherit capabilities of their parent groups

Access control

Access to pages (posts, pages, products and other post types) can be restricted by group.

If access to a page is restricted to one or more groups, only users who belong to one of those groups may view it.

Fully supports custom post types, so that access to post types such as products or events can easily be restricted.

Built-in access control that allows to restrict access to whole pages to specific groups only.
Blocks: The Groups Member block allows to restrict the visibility of its content to members of selected groups. The Groups Non-Member block hides its content from members of chosen groups. The blocks can be nested to provide multiple layers of access control to content.
Shortcodes allow to control who can access sections of content on pages, show parts to members of certain groups or to those who are not members. Shortcodes can also be used to show content for users based on their capabilities.

Easy user interface

Integrates nicely with the standard WordPress Users menu
Provides an intuitive Groups menu
Conceptually clean views showing the essentials
Quick filters to locate groups, capabilities, users and pages
Bulk-actions where needed, apply capabilities to groups, add users to groups, remove users from groups, protect pages in bulk

Sensible options

Enable access restrictions by custom post type
An optional tree view for groups can be shown when desired
Provides its own set of permissions
Administrator overrides for tests
Cleans up after testing with a “delete all plugin data” option

Framework

Groups is designed based on a solid and sound data-model with a complete API that allows developers to create group-oriented web applications and plugins

Multisite

All features are supported independently for each blog in multisite installations

Extensions for Groups and WooCommerce

You can add more features with official extensions that further integrate Groups and WooCommerce. Among the extensions in the WooCommerce Marketplace we recommend:

Groups Integration

Sell Memberships with Groups and WooCommerce. Grants memberships based on products. It automatically assigns a customer to one or more groups based on the products ordered.

Group Coupons

Automatically apply and restrict coupon validity for user groups. Offer exclusive, automatic and targeted discounts for your customers.

WooCommerce Product Search

The perfect Search Engine helps customers to find and buy products quickly – essential for every WooCommerce store. Supports performance features based on group memberships.

Restrict Payment Methods

Limit the use of Payment Methods by Group Memberships, Roles, Countries, and Order Amounts.