[wp-hackers] Regional Author Groups and Permission

[David Churchill]

Hi, I need some advice on the best way to approach building an event/booking website with multi author support.

The idea is one website listing lots of regional events. Users can geo-search events based on name, town, city and zip/post code with a distance radius in miles (5,10,25 etc). Then book the event online via PayPal and other payment gateways.

I have all of this working using Events Calendar Pro (Modern Tribe), Geo my WP (free plugin) for the geo-search, WooCommerce and WooTickets for the booking/tickets/payments.

What I am struggling with is how best to setup regional authors. I would ideally like to create regional groups with a main coordinator and a number of event publishers under the each region.

Each publisher will be able to create/publish edit/delete their own events, but not any other publishers (ideally other publishers events need to be hidden in the backend). The coordinators will be able to create/publish and edit/delete their own events and those belonging to the publishers in the same group (so see all events by all publishers in the same regional group). They will be able to publish events on behalf of the publishers, so will need to be able to select the author in the Author drop-down list. There will be a number of regional groups and all the events in each group will need to be hidden from the other groups. Hope this is making sense?

I have looked at a number of group based plugins, but they all appear to work by setting the permissions on a per event (post) based system which will not work as it will rely on publishers setting this very time.

I have also looked at a network/mu install of WordPress and think this is probably the best approach, but Events Calendar Pro currently doesn't support sharing the events back to the main network site — ideally all mu sites will only be used for adding content and not visible by the end user.

There is another event plugin called Events Organiser Pro which does support mu integration and saves all events in the main network sites db but doesn't support WooCommerce.

Another possible idea would be to create front-end templates for publishers so that they can add/edit and view their own events.

So (apologies for long-winded question), but does anybody have any recommendations or suggestions for managing groups and users where their content is ring-fenced/hidden from other groups/users. I'm happy to hack code if this is something that could be done in code.

Thanks in advance,
David