Getting Roles from 'Groups' (Groups plugin)

Thanks for sharing this!

It seems like there ought to be a better way to get a list of the group names than a direct query on the database, but I’m not familiar with how Groups works.

You’re welcome. Thanks for the great plugin!

I agree… there ought to be a better way. I looked for a while and found a few posts like this Groups support thread that point to a direct query solution on github. I ended up borrowing from Groups’ shortcode handler code from the plugin itself (see lib/views/class-groups-shortcode.php).

If I come up with something better I’ll add to this topic.

I just took a very cursory look and don’t see anything in the way of a template tag either… and because the groups are “posts” I don’t really know how else to query them other than what you’ve done. There is an open thread on the Groups board asking this same question. Maybe the author will answer that.

Anyway, if you don’t want to add caps with the same name you could filter $visible = apply_filters( 'nav_menu_roles_item_visibility', $visible, $item );. Though, I couldn’t tell you how to determine if the current user in in a specific group? In that sense, maybe your way is easier after all.

Hi, helgatheviking. I’m not sure if this answers your question

I couldn’t tell you how to determine if the current user in in a specific group?

but you can try the following which I also posted in Groups forum under your comment ??

$user = new Groups_User( $user_id );
$groups = $user->groups;

print_r($groups);

That should help when it comes to filtering the visibility via 'nav_menu_roles_item_visibility' in lieu of creating capabilities with names that match the group name. Probably some kind of in_array() check.

So I’ve been exploring the ‘nav_menu_roles_item_visibility’ as helgatheviking suggested and ended up writing a plugin to add Group names as custom roles and enable a filter to turn on menu items when a group-based role has been selected. This approach reduces chance of user error and the redundancy of having to add a capability within Groups.

The plugin has two functions:
1) nmr_groups_to_roles – almost exactly like the function that I started this thread with except the name is more accurate and the $key for $roles[$key] is also the name of the Group. This is important because when we compare arrays of Group names and NMR roles in the next function, $items->roles is an array of the $key values, not the names of the roles. (‘nmr’ is short for Nav Menu Roles, of course.) (BTW – I scoured the Groups API and forum but couldn’t find a way to pull just the names of the Groups w/o a direct database query.)
2) nmr_item_visibility – this is the filter modeled after helgatheviking’s example in the NMR FAQ. It puts the current user’s groups into an array and then checks to see if any of those groups are also in the $item->roles array using array_intersect. Here’s the code:

/*
Add Group names as custom roles to Nav Menu Roles menu list
param: $roles an array of all available roles, by default is global $wp_roles
return: array
*/

function nmr_groups_to_roles ( $roles ) {
	global $wpdb;

	$order_by = 'name';
	$order = 'ASC';

	$group_table = _groups_get_tablename( "group" );
	if ( $groups = $wpdb->get_results(
			"SELECT group_id FROM $group_table ORDER BY $order_by $order" ))
		{
			foreach( $groups as $group ) {
				$group = new Groups_Group( $group->group_id );
				// set $key of $roles to $group->name;
				// this is important because $item->roles is an array of the $key values
				$roles [$group->name] = $group->name;
			}
	}
	return $roles;
}

add_filter( 'nav_menu_roles', 'nmr_groups_to_roles' );

/*
Set visibility of menu item to true, if
- current user is a member of a group
- AND that group has been given permission to see the menu item via Menu interface
param: $visible boolean
param: $item object, the complete menu object. Nav Menu Roles adds its info to $item->roles
return: boolean
*/

function nmr_item_visibility( $visible, $item ){

	if( isset( $item->roles ) && is_array( $item->roles ) ){
		$current_users_groups = array();

		// get current user's groups and put into array
		$user_ID = get_current_user_id();
		$user = new Groups_User( $user_ID );
		$groups = $user->groups;
		foreach( $groups as $group ) {
			$current_users_groups[] = $group->name;
		}

		if (! empty($current_users_groups)) {
			// if any of the user's groups are among the roles selected via Nav Menu Groups, set visibility to true
			if ((bool) array_intersect($current_users_groups, $item->roles) ) {
				$visible = true;
			}
		}
 	}
	return $visible;
}

add_filter( 'nav_menu_roles_item_visibility', 'nmr_item_visibility', 10, 2);

@philzo – that is so cool… great job! thanks so much for sharing it. +100

I’m looking to do this same thing, however I’m not incredibly familiar with this plugin. Where should this code go?

I’d probably create a new plugin.