---
title: Allowing users to create groups
related:
  - https://docs.kentico.com/k8/community-features/groups/creating-groups-on-the-live-site.md
  - https://docs.kentico.com/k8/community-features/groups/customizing-group-pages-using-widgets.md
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

You can enable site users to create new groups by placing the **Group registration** web part on your site. You have to set the following properties of the web part:

- **Template source alias path** - alias path of the document that will be used, together with the documents stored under it, as a template for groups created by the web part. If left empty, the value of the _Settings -> Community -> Group template path_ field will be used.
- **Template target alias path** - alias path where the documents copied from the _Template source alias path_ will be loaded when a group is created.
- **Automatically create forum** - if checked, a forum group and a General discussion forum are automatically added under the created group.
- **Automatically create media library** - if checked, a media library is automatically added under the created group.
- **Automatically create smart search indexes** - if checked, a smart search index is automatically created for the documents of the created group, as well as for the new forum if the _Automatically create forum_ property is enabled.
- **Group profile URL path** - alias path of the page containing the group profile. The _**{groupname}**_ wildcard can be used to substitute for the name of the current group.
- **Combine with default culture** - if checked, the default culture will be used when creating group pages under a culture where the source or target nodes were not found.
- **Group name label text** - text that will be displayed in the form before the field where the group name is entered.
- **Text after successful registration** - text displayed when a group is successfully created.
- **Text after successful registration with approving** - text displayed when a group is successfully created, but requires an administrator's approval to be published on the web.
- **Require approval** - if checked, the group will have to be approved by a site administrator before it is published on the site.
- **Redirect to URL** - URL where the user will be redirected after creating the group.
- **Hide form after registration** - if checked, the form will be hidden after creating the group.

## Group pages templates

Each group has its own section on the website where its content is stored - so called group pages. When adding the **Group registration web part** to your site, you have to specify the **Template source alias path** and **Template target alias path** properties. These two properties are essential when creating the **group pages section** of each group.

The page specified by the **Template source alias path** and all its sub-pages are copied to the location specified by the **Template target alias path**.

To get a better idea of how this works, you can take a look at the sample Community Starter site. On the site, the **Group registration** web part is configured in the following way:

- **Template source alias path**: /Groups/Template
- **Template target alias path**: /Group-pages

As you can see in the screenshot below, there is the **/Groups/Template** page with one sub-page: **Pages**. When a new group is created, its title page is created under **/Group-pages** and the **Pages** page is created under it. The web parts placed on the title page are identical to those placed on the **Template** page. Web parts on the **Pages** page are also identical to the source **Pages** page. Under **Pages**, all group documents will be stored.

![Sources for group pages and their application](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/k8/allowing-users-to-create-groups/group_page_sources.png "Sources for group pages and their application")

All Kentico documents can be set to be owned by a group. To do this, select a document from the content tree and go to **Properties -> General**. Then click **Change** next to **Owned by group** and choose a group from the drop-down list. This property is used to identify which group a document belongs to and is used by various group context sensitive web parts to display the correct content. It also influences the editing permissions of Group administrator widget zones.

In **Settings -> Community**, you can enable or disable the **Use parent community group for new documents** option. It you have it enabled, all newly created documents will inherit the group assignment from their parent document.