[ckan-dev] Hiding groups on CKAN sites

Wed Apr 17 11:28:12 UTC 2013

Hey all,

We're pushing CKAN's new organizations feature a lot and encouraging
people to use organizations instead of groups. A common request that I'm
getting is to hide the groups feature from the front page, removing the
"featured groups" from the front page and replacing them with featured
organizations, and removing the groups link from the nav bar at the top
of the site.

This doesn't work very well because groups still pop up elsewhere in the
interface, for example faceting by group shows up on the dataset search
page (even if the site doesn't have any groups) and adding a dataset to
a group shows up on the dataset edit form, etc.

It seems when we added organizations to 2.0 alongside we didn't realise
that many sites would want to use organizations and not use groups and
therefore they won't want groups showing up all over the web interface.

Is this something we should implement as a 2.1 feature? I'm thinking a
boolean config option "ckan.show_groups = true" and if you set it to
false, then groups are hidden everywhere in the frontend.

This could be implemented in an extension first so it can be used with
2.0, and then make it into core in 2.1.

Let me know what you think about this idea

P.S. Related to this we probably want an easy way to show featured
organizations as well as featured groups on the front page, and to
easily show/hide featured orgs and featured groups entirely, see earlier
email "'Featured Organizations' on the front page"