Does Plone support distinct sets of users in subgroups?

[Rene Pijlman]

wheel:
>I'm not sure if this is the right venue for Plone questions, if not, 
>could someone ref me to a better one? 

The plone-users mailing list. Highly recommended.

>The discussion groups on the plone site are mailing lists and I'd 
>rather not subscribe quite yet.

Why not? It's free, takes 1 minute and you can unsubscribe at any time.

>Does plone support distinct sets of users? 

Yes. There's a user-group mechanism.
http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/understanding-permissions/tutorial-all-pages

>That is, on a public website running plone, can it be configured such 
>that when a user logs in they are allowed access to a subgroup's main 
>page, 

That can be done with local roles on the sharing tab. See the link above.

>get the subgroup's newsletter as well as the main site's newsletter etc?

I'm not sure about that. I guess it depends on how you implement the
newsletter. It may require a little customization or programming.

-- 
René Pijlman