Why are applications separate from groups?

Hey Oli,

The simple answer here is, flexibility! More often than not, we're seeing a group homepage be the container for an application but also calling out other relevant information or bundling topics into one. Just to clarify, applications are part of the group container, specific widgets are just contextual to the applications, which is what I *think* you're getting at. At the end of the day, I'd imagine if you could plop (technical term) widgets on the homepage of the group and they just know which application its pointing to, you likely wouldn't have the question?

Just FYI, for use cases such as yours as it stands today, you can bypass the group homepage via navigation where customers never have to see it. Just adjust the nav widget to go directly to the forum page.

A question I have is, why are you needing to create new groups for new forums? Do the topics not fit well in another group or at the site level? Would love to understand more about what you're trying to accomplish so I can help on the strategy side!

Thanks!

Thanks Grant, yes my plan is to bypass the Group when it comes to navigation.

To answer your question, this was a historical decision. We have two main use cases, blogs and forums. We have created product orientated Groups and each Group has a forum and a blog. The Group page is used to surface content from both applications.

In the case of this new Group, there is no requirement for a blog so the Group is only going to show forum content. Which makes the Group page worthless, so yes I am just directing users to the forum right now.

I am reviewing how we have organised our IA, so we may change it up and have all forums attached to a single group, or a couple of groups etc.

Cheers for the reply, I appreciate it.

Perhaps as a side note: People subscribe to a group with a certain interest. They do not subscribe to a Forum application. In "the old days" you had dedicated applications like phpBB that did Grouping inside an Application. As Grant mentioned, it is more flexible to have a forum inside a group, but also more logical. Fortunately you can make the group behave like a forum by moving widgets in and out.