Could I use categories for users instead of user groups?

Question

I'm developing a sports league site. The roles I'm setting up are admins, coaches, and players - with myself being the "super" admin.

This is my first Craft project, so right off the bat I started developing the site by distinguishing the capabilities of each role through the user groups. I'm currently having issues with registering coaches & players to their respective user groups through plugins, though. No one other than myself will be using the Craft CP. I'll be creating their own back-end dashboard to manage their own teams, user profiles, etc...

Which leads me to the question: Should I even be designating the users to different user groups? Or just throw them into specific categories & check against those with the current logged user?

Theoretically they would have all the permissions through Craft, but I'd limit what they can accomplish through the dashboard I create for them.

Answer 1

If the users will never have access to the Craft CP then you can use categories or any other applicable field type (i.e. dropdown, radio buttons, tags, etc.) to create differentiation between the users. It really just depends on how accessible and/or 'static' you want the groups or sudo-groups to be. Categories and tags for example can be created dynamically, without having field editing privileges like a drop-down field would require. But since you are currently the only admin, it probably won't make much difference in the end. I would however, at a minimum create groups that differentiate between users that have different access privileges to the CP, otherwise it's totally up to you — whatever makes most sense and is easiest to manage.