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The Group module in Drupal is a powerful way of collecting together users and content under a single entity. These arbitrary collections of entities in a Drupal site can be used for editor teams within your site or company subscriptions where users can manage themselves, or anything that requires groups of users to be created.
During a recent project that used the Group module I found myself digging deeper into the Groups permissions system in order to achieve certain tasks. This is a similar permission system to that already created in Drupal, with the exception that the permission always forms a link between a Group and a user, and an optional additional entity. Permissions being local to the group is useful if you want to create groups of users that had access to pages and other entitiies that are kept within the group.
Group permissions are by no means simple though, and the different layers that exist within the permissions systems can make it difficult to see what is preventing access to a particular entity. This situation is complicated by the fact that much of the documentation and third party modules are built around Group version 2, with the current release of Group being version 3. For example, there is a documentation page on extending Groups access control, but as this is only for Groups version 2.0 it doesn’t help with the latest version of Groups.
In this article I will look at how to create and use permissions within the Group module to grant users certain permissions if they are members of groups. Each example will get more complex as we go through the article and I will show how to use the permission within the site to control access.
