Your first point is quite valid, but unfortunately I wasn't able to get this into the imminent Moodle 1.8 release. I am working on grouping support for wikis (and a colleague for forums) for 1.9. In addition, I need to talk to Martin D. - there is a chance this functionality could make 1.8.1, or be offered on the forums as a (large) code patch.

The second one may be a bug. I'm on holiday for a couple of weeks so can't look soon.

Sorry I can't be more help. Yours Nick

this is a big problem for all users.

We can't add a new form for groups and grouping in the administration block that is not working for the teacher or only working in one activity. If you are creating a new feature only working in one activity it should be part of the settings form in this activity, but not in the course administration block.

If this new feature can't be coded for 1.8 we should go back to the old administration groups page.

I get the impression that too much effort is going into getting the NEXT release out when energy might better be placed in getting the current release working properly.

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Groupings_and_Groups

At this stage I will concentrate in two new features:

a) Making possible to use different groupings by different activities.
Activities can declare a grouping to use. This means that when that particular activity is set as visible/separate groups, the particular groups used are those belonging to the declared grouping. Hence, we can have simultaneous activities where users are distributed according to different criteria, activities & resources may be targeted to different audiences.

The needed changes are adding a field "groupingid" to the courses and course_modules tables to hold the grouping that the course itself or each module instance will use when set in visible/separate groupmode. By "using grouping" I mean that grouping-aware functions should operate nor on all groups associated with a course but only those associated with a grouping. So, you may have a forum declaring a grouping and thus using a particular set of groups. At the same time other activity in the course, let say an assignment may declare other grouping and thus treat the same users as distributed in a completely different set of groups.

"Use grouping" must be added to the configuration form for each module instance, parallel to "groupmode" attribute. Best way is to add to te common module settings

Module code must be adapted to ensure that $cm->groupingid property now existing is passed to groups-API functions within the module code to return/manage only those groups belonging to the declared grouping.

b) Group-based content delivery
Once each activity, and resources, may declare a grouping to use, it is possible to make that those users that are not members of any group of that grouping cannot access to the module content (being it an interactive activity or a Resource module instance)
A simple checking for group membership at the beggining of the view.php file for each module would do the trick
Group-membership may be checked at course page (function print_section() ) to make links to forbidden modules invisible to users without suitable access.

At ULPGC we have a test site with these features ENABLED, that is, already coded. You may find it at http://moodle.ulpgc.es/moodle19ulpgc/course/view.php?id=3
Try login as user "prof01", "prof02" or "estudiante01", "estudiante02" ... with password "moodle" for all

The file attached is a unified diff against HEAD that can be used to explore proposed code changes.