Granular group-based permissions for anonymous and logged in users

martin · July 16, 2026, 3:48am

martin:

This one for example from group sidebar menus, I think I would make it work in the same way, so you have this in the config:
groups:
  type: groups
  required: true
  resolve_group_memberships: true
  validations:
    max: 20
Then on the client groups would become user_in_groups as a boolean.

I’ve implemented this in the PR below:

github.com/discourse/discourse

DEV: Add resolve_group_membership for theme object settings of group type (#41756)

main ← dev/resolve-group-membership-theme-object-group

merged 12:19AM - 17 Jul 26 UTC

martin-brennan

+601 -14

Followup 7e77ce4bd3889820d67b52a5788357ac6f7b2f58 We need to automatically re…solve group membership into a boolean for theme object type settings which are of the group type, similar to what we did in the original commit above for group list type settings. This behaves in the same way -- for an object setting schema like this: ``` menu_sections: type: objects default: - name: section 1 groups: - 1 - 3 schema: name: menu section properties: name: type: string groups: type: groups resolve_group_membership: true ``` We replace `groups` with a boolean `user_in_groups` (groups is just the property name, it could be foo_bar etc.) and then you can do this on the client: ``` for (const section of settings.menu_sections) { if (section.user_in_groups) { // User is in at least one selected group for this section. } } ``` Rather than inspecting the `currentUser.groups`, which only includes visible groups, not all groups the user is a member of. This allows for more accurate permission checks for theme settings that are group based. Also c.f. https://meta.discourse.org/t/granular-group-based-permissions-for-anonymous-and-logged-in-users/402273/18?u=martin

And @Lilly I’ve made a PR to your group-sidebar-menus theme component from a fork which applies this functionality in a backwards-compat way:

github.com/Lillinator/group-sidebar-menus

DEV: Apply resolve_group_membership changes from core (#5)

main ← martin-brennan:dev/apply-resolve-group-changes

opened 03:43AM - 16 Jul 26 UTC

martin-brennan

+23 -12

See https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/41756, which must be merged fir…st `resolve_group_membership` can now be used on group type of theme setting object settings, so instead of relying on currentUser.groups which only has visible groups in the client, we can use `user_in_groups` which is automatically resolved from the server side This is backwards-compatible with sites that don't yet have the core functionality deployed

Will work on the disallowed_groups part next.

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Granular group-based permissions for anonymous and logged in users

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