Title: Only one parent group?
Last modified: August 21, 2016

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# Only one parent group?

 *  Resolved [jkhongusc](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jkhongusc/)
 * (@jkhongusc)
 * [13 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/only-one-parent-group/)
 * This is a serious limitation for our requirements =( We definitely need the ability
   for groups to have multiple parents. We are a large institution with thousands
   of users and groups. Just wondering if anyone sees this as a limitation too.
 * I was looking through the code and database tables. Unfortunately adding multiple
   parent groups would be a significant modification.
 * My suggestions to the author:
    1) I would change the groups_user_group table 
   which maps users to groups (or vice versa). Instead I would make it more flexible…
   groups_group_mapping table which maps a group_id to member_id which can be a 
   group or user. The table would look like this group_id bigint member_id bigint
   member_type tinyint (e.g. 0 = user, 1 = group)
 * Doing that change will allow groups to contain multiple groups and users as members.
   Of course it complicates the logic in determining membership because of recursion(
   and avoiding circular loops).
    2) If you did #1 then you would not need groups_group.
   parent_id anymore
 * Just something to think about. Excellent plugin in general.
 * [http://wordpress.org/plugins/groups/](http://wordpress.org/plugins/groups/)

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

 *  Thread Starter [jkhongusc](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jkhongusc/)
 * (@jkhongusc)
 * [13 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/only-one-parent-group/#post-4002123)
 * Marking this as resolved.
 * We are going to work around this limitation. Instead of focusing on groups and
   group hierarchy, we will focus on capabilities. I believe we can work around 
   groups only having one parent by using (multiple) capabilities instead.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

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 * ![](https://ps.w.org/groups/assets/icon-256x256.png?rev=983146)
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 * 1 reply
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [jkhongusc](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jkhongusc/)
 * Last activity: [13 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/only-one-parent-group/#post-4002123)
 * Status: resolved