New site ACL advice, please

Hello,

I am in the process of setting up a new site to service a subscription based community.
The actual community is a (mostly) academic institute whereby membership is by (written) application.

My most significant first question is:
Given that there are
(a) Members,
(b) a Council, and
(c) a full time administrative support office, and that
(d) there are multiple grades of membership,
where only certain grades qualify for certain actions (e.g. only (i) fully paid up (ii) full members may participate in council voting),
what does the CB community recommend I do regarding access control?

Some extra details:
*) The administrative support office and certain other people can create and publish site articles.
*) The members can create items in the Kunena forum.

Membership types:
With voting rights:
Ordinary members
Honorary members
Fellows
Life members
Retired members

With no voting rights:
Student members
Associate members
Corporate members

Council members are made up from the list of voting members.
All the above map onto a person, except Corporate members, which maps onto a business (but there is usually a nominated contact person).

There is more (e.g. specialist groups, including one that allows participation from non-members) but I'll wait for your advice on the basics, first.

The site is using Joolma! 1.7, with the latest Community Builder core.

Regards,
Kevin

Perhaps is best to post your information on Joomla.org. It doesn't particularly matter to CB how you have it setup as CB doesn't manage the setup (ensure you stay within the defaults, don't create new top level usergroups). Joomla ACL works with parent/child relationships with accesslevels acting as groups of usergroups. Example of what you may want is as follows.

Member = Registered
Council = Manager
Admins = Administrator

This would give you essentially what you're wanting using the defaults (just rename them).

For a subscription system I recommend using CBSubs, which we'd be glad to assist with providing setup feedback.

Thanks. I'll consider creating a Joomla! community account.

I suspect that this is closer to what I'll need:
Public -> Non-voting -> Voting -> Council
Combined with?
Public -> Registered -> Admin

Or does this conflict with:

(ensure you stay within the defaults, don't create new top level usergroups)

?

I'll create a new thread with my next problem (but I need to finalise ACL first, for obvious reasons): Member import.

Thanks. I'll consider creating a Joomla! community account.

Recommend the below.

Public
- Registered (non-voting)
- - Voting
- - - Council
- - - - Admin

If Admin is a website admin to manage various tasks then just use the existing administrator or manager usergroups as CB and Joomla are already designed to use them in such a manner. If council is suppose to have some form of management then just use the existing manager usergroup. Of course you can rename administrator and manager usergroups to whatever you like. So for example you'd have as follows.

Public
- Manager (Council)
- - Administrator (Admin)
- Registered (non-Voting)
- - Voting

Or does this conflict with:

Just don't go outside of Public as CB and Joomla don't know how to react to those groups.

Member import.

You should use CB Juice for importing users.