CommunityAlly Feature Overview

CommunityAlly is a new AccessAlly add-on that allows you to create forums and groups where members can interact with each other, right inside your offerings.

Here you’ll learn more about what you can do with CommunityAlly. If you have more questions, check out the CommunityAlly FAQ.

Groups

CommunityAlly Groups are built inside AccessAlly Offerings to provide participants with a way to connect with each other.

There are 3 main components to a group:

• Feed – where members can post updates
• Members – all of the participants of the group
• Settings – only visible to admins to allow for changing the group cover image, adding a group description, or adding a theme template (with a sidebar for example) to the group.

Click here to see how to create new groups.

Feed

This is the main page of a group and is probably where your members will spend most of their time in CommunityAlly. Here, users are able to:

1. Post to the group using the post form
2. Search for feed by specific strings in the feed content
3. Favorite, comment, and delete the feed. Group organizers (Site Admins) can delete anyone’s feed while members will only be able to delete their own feed.
4. Mention other users. Start by typing ‘@’ and continue typing the name of the user you’d like to mention. Select the user from the dropdown to mention them. Users will also receive a notification when they’ve been mentioned.

On the feed page, comments are automatically collapsed to save space. Use the comments toggle at the bottom right corner of an activity to show and hide comments.

Members

This tab shows all members of the group. From here you can search or sort members and gain easy access to their profiles by clicking on their profile image or their name.

Settings

This tab is only available to site admins.

There are 2 sub-tabs in settings: edit details and cover image.

The Details Tab

1. Change your group’s name and description. Remember to save your changes using the SAVE CHANGES button.
2. Select a template to be used for your Group. This is optional and could be helpful if you would like your group to have a sidebar. Templates are built using your WordPress theme.

*All WordPress themes (except our AccessAlly Theme) are considered 3rd party tools. Reach out to your theme company if you are not familiar or new to creating templates within your WordPress theme.

The Cover Image Tab

Under the cover image, you’ll be able to change your group’s cover image by uploading an image of your choice. Recommended sizing is 1300 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall.

User Profiles

Every member of your community will have a profile. It introduces them to the rest of the community and allows them to quickly manage and access their groups and activities.

This profile is connected to an AccessAlly Profile to keep everything consistent on your site.

There are 5 main components to a user’s profile:

• Profile – visible to all group members
• Notifications – visible to admins and members
• Favorites – visible to admins and members
• Groups – visible to all group members
• Settings – admin only

Profile

The profile is a public-facing tab that introduces you to the rest of the members of the community. By default, the profile will contain a first name, last name, and bio.

Notifications

There are 3 types of notifications.

1. Username commented on one of your updates – this occurs when someone leaves a comment on your post
2. Username replied to one of your activity comments – this occurs when someone replies to a comment that you left.
3. Username mentioned you – this occurs when someone mentions you, in either a post or a comment.

There are 2 sub-tabs under notifications, read and unread.

Clicking on the notification will open the activity in a new tab. Here, the comments are expanded by default and you can respond to anything that needs to be addressed. Opening the activity will mark it as read. However, you can always navigate to the read tab and mark the notification as unread to address it at a later time.

Other notification actions include:

1. Marking a single notification as read or unread or deleting it.
2. Selecting multiple notifications and performing bulk notification management.
3. Sorting notification by the time received.

Favorites

The favorites tab allows users to quickly see all of their favorite activities. They can use this feature to bookmark any activities that they’re interested in, in any of their groups, and come back to their own profile to see and manage their list of favorites.

Groups

The groups tab allows users to quickly see all groups that they have access to and quickly navigate to a group to make posts/comments. This can be very helpful if you are not using offering menus as this provides another way for users to access groups. Users are also able to sort their groups by last active, most members, newly created, and alphabetical order.