Groups - Overview

One of the very special features at Family Recipe Central is the ability to form and work within groups. You can create a group for just about any purpose that brings people together online and enables them to collaborate on various projects. Of course, as a family recipe site, the most common use of the group function is to create a family group that allows family members and relatives to collaborate online and create the family cookbook.

There are many different functions and activities you can accomplish within a group including:

• Group Privacy: Groups are private by default. Only group members invited or approved by the group administrator can access and view the content inside the group. This keeps the activity inside the group safe and secure and provides your family privacy as you collaborate online to create your family cookbook.
   
• Group Forum: You can communicate and share with other group members inside your group forum. Only group members have access to the group forum. This is a great tool to hold discussions, keep track of projects, exchange ideas and help organize all the cooks in the kitchen. Better than email, the forum keeps a well organized archive of your discussions that other family members can review and come back to for many years to come.
  
  For example, quite often, there's a lot of information that you'll want to pull together when you assemble a family cookbook. With a collaborative online tool, your family stories, history, as well as recipes can be collected from across the family wherever family members and relatives might be located. The forum is a great way to organize all of this family information.
   
• Group Blog: If you like the blogging format, you have a group blog that you can use to publish and share news and discussion with your family. You can choose to keep this blog private to the family group, or provide public access for others outside your family group to view and participate (leave comments) on your group blog.
   
• Group Recipes: When you create recipes, you can assign (include) the recipe in one or more groups where you're a member. And you have full control whether the recipe is private to these groups, or can be viewed in public outside of the groups. If you want to keep your family recipes a secret within the family, you can do that easily. Of course, we'd love if you would share some of your favorite family recipes with the rest of us, but the control is all up to you.
   
• Group Recipe Books: Once you've created a collection of recipes within your group, you can publish these recipes to your family cookbook. You can create as many different versions of your family cookbook as you like. Cookbooks can be attractively formatted and include stories, images and recipes that you publish.
   
• Group Gallery:You have a group gallery where you can publish as many image and photo galleries as you like. Families always want to share photos. Again, image galleries inside the group can only be accessed and viewed by other group (family) members.
   
• Group Videos: You can upload videos to your group video gallery. More and more these days, families love to share videos (especially videos of the new babies and the grandchildren) as much as pictures and photographs. Why not do both?
   
• Group Events: You can schedule group events, such as a family gathering, holiday party, graduation, etc. Other group members can signup to attend these events. You can keep track of RSVPs and contact information for event signups. This makes it easy to organize those family events. For example, many families hold a family reunion each year. This is an ideal way to get the word out, keep track of who'll be attending, and have your extended family members submit recipes and bring food for the family reunion, all within your online family group. It's a great tool to organize these type of family events.
   
• Group Comments: As with most of the content on this website, you can leave comments that allow you to extend and continue the conversation. This goes for all of the content that you publish inside your family group including comments on blog posts, forum posts, recipes, photos in the gallery, videos, etc.
  
  For example, how many times have you been at a big family gathering and taken lots of family photos. Some time goes by and you can't always remember the name of the new girlfriend that showed up with one of the nephews, or you don't recognize one of the faces (your cousins kids have grown up so much since you last saw them). You put the pictures up in the gallery and your other family members and relatives can leave comments to fill in the gaps.
   
• Group Voting and Ratings: Want to test which are the most popular family recipes. Have your family members vote (5 star voting) on their favorite dishes. It's easy to track, and you can keep it all withing the group.
   
• Annotations: You can keep your own personal notes on recipes and photos. Only you can see these personal notes, no one else. This is perfect for adding your own personal additions to a recipe without having to create a separate version or have to mark it up with your own notes that spoil the presentation for others. Of course, if you want to share your notes with others, just post a comment (rather than a personal note) - see above.

That's just some of the useful capabilities you'll find inside the group function. With all of these capabilities, you'll find many more useful ways to use the family group function to bring your family together, no matter where they may be located.

To find out how all of this works, you'll just need to create a group and get started. To jump right in, see the "create a family group" quick start guide.