What are multi-layer Community Groups?
Typically, Communities are structured in two layers. The first layer is the 'Parent' Community, or the title of the Community Group (i.e. 'Career Communities', 'Audiences', 'Industries', 'Next Steps', etc.). The second layer consists of all the Communities within that group. For instance, if the Parent Community (first layer) is 'Industry', some typical second layer Communities would be 'Healthcare', 'Engineering and Technology', 'Arts & Media', etc. In this scenario, 'Healthcare', 'Engineering and Technology', 'Arts & Media', are all 'Sub Communities' (or Child Communities) of the 'Industry' Community.
Here's a visual to help clarify:
Sometimes, you might want to further segment your content within a second-layer Community, by creating a third-layer Community. For instance, you might want to break 'Arts & Media' into 'Performance Art', 'Visual Arts, 'Communications', and 'Design'. You can do so by following the instructions below:
Add a third-layer Community:
Navigate to 'Manage' > 'Communities'
Click 'Add New'
Type in the name of the new third-level Community you want to add, and select the top layer parent Community for it.
Click 'Add New Tag'.
Once the Community has been created, locate it within the full list of Communities and select 'Edit'.
Within the edit screen, expand the 'Community Group' dropdown, and find the second-layer Community you want to have as the sub-parent of this specific Community.
Viola! You have a third-layer. The hierarchy now appears like this:
What are the nuances of third-layer Communities?
There are a few important things to note when creating third-layer Communities, which we've outlined for you below:
When tagging content, filtering content, or selecting your account preferences, third-layer communities will show up in the same group of tags as their sub-parents, all within the highest level parent tag. In this scenario for instance, 'Arts & Media' 'Healthcare' and 'Engineering and Technology' would show up alongside 'Performance Art', 'Visual Arts, 'Communications', and 'Design' within the same group of tags, under 'Industry'. If you want to omit third-layer Communities from these tagging or filtering screens, you can choose to hide them on a case-by-case basis ('by toggling 'Is hidden?' to 'yes' within the edit screen of the individual community).
When you tag content to a third-layer Community, it will obviously pull into any dynamic widgets that are enabled on that Community Page, but it will also pull into any dynamic widgets on the sub-parent and highest level parent page as well. (If you want to circumvent this behavior, submit a support request and we can do some widget magic!)