EE Insider

Create member groups first

When creating a site, I’ll often create a special member group called something like “Client Admin” for my client because I don’t necessarily want them to have “Super Admin” access (particularly if they’re not a very tech savvy client).

This is one of the very first things that I do when setting up a new EE site. Several aspects of EE, such as weblog category groups, statuses, and file upload directories, have assignments for member groups. (For example, you can determine if a particular member group has access to add/edit/delete categories for a specific group).

If you create member groups towards the end of the development cycle, after you have all of your category groups, etc., set up, then you have to do a lot of backtracking so as to set up the necessary group assignments (which, if you’re me, means inevitably missing one or two things at first and have to go back through everything again).

However, if you have your member group(s) already set up—even if you don’t have all of the group’s settings configured—then you can set up the various assignments along the way. Which means less time spent backtracking when you’re towards the end of development.