We use Drupal as the basis for a student information website. We have 3 intakes of students a year and I would like to be able to allocate students various rights based on roles, primarily if they are
But I would also like to be able to identify them by what class they did.
Best and simple way is to assigning Roles.
I'd probably initially set up the Current Student, Applying Student, and Alumni roles and get that out of the way.
I'd then have a content type called Class, and hold all of the class information you require in here. I'd then use the Entity Reference to create a link between each student, and any classes they take. This will allow you to filter quite easily in Views and such users based on classes.
Alternatively, if the classes are required to have communities (i.e. people from the Biology class have a place to post information etc) I suppose you could use Organic Groups and sign each student up to the relevent classes/groups.
If you need me to expand on anything or if this doesn't fit then please let me know in the comments and I'll see if I can help any more!
You could, for sure, use the Group module for this. Group allows for creating arbitrary collections of your content and users on your site, and grant access control permissions on those collections. It is available as of D7, and has a D8 version also. It is designed to be an alternative to Organic Groups. The Group module creates groups as entities, making them fully fieldable, extensible and exportable.
Some more details about the various roles used by the Group module:
Configured Global Roles: These roles can be configured via the admin interface of the Group module, they are available (to grant permissions) for all individual groups (regardless of the "Group Type"). These roles cannot have permissions that vary per group type (they are all the same). Typical examples of such roles could be "Group Moderator" or "Group Administrator".
Special Global Roles: These are the special (hardcoded) roles named "Outsider" (= a signed in user that did not join a group) and "Member" (= a signed in user that did join a group). These cannot be defined by the Drupal administrator, and they are always available for any group. Unlike Configured Global Roles, these roles can have different permissions sets for each group type. Special case: the role "Anonymous" is related to a user that is not signed).
Group Specific Roles: These roles can be configured per group type and will only be available on groups of that group type. As an example, for a group type like "Class", you could configure roles such as "Teacher", "Student", "Alumni", etc.
The Group module integrates with various other (popular) modules, including:
The beauty, IMO, of these integrations are that they are more or less out-of-the box (not dozens of extra modules needed to make those integrations work).
I'm afraid your not making much sense- really BIG thanks for saying this after I'm trying to help you... :D I referred to writing a simple module to restrict access depending on roles as a user can have multiple roles (e.g. "currently student" role AND "goes to second class" role, etc.) - or depending on the beginning year of the studies, you can calculate if someone is still a student or not, etc. BUT if you don't understand what someone is trying to say, you could ASK instead of insulting him/her with saying his words don't make any sense at all, especially when he/she tries to help you.