A community for maintaining user membership can be provided. Each major component of the communities framework can have multiple portals associated with its series of tests. Each of these portals can start out as a portal file. These portal files can be ran through the dissassembler in order to render the portals representing individual community instances. Once the community instance is created for the portal, various HTML unit tests can be written by the developer in order to access that portal as some user with given membership and functional capabilities. The test framework can automatically create users giving them membership in the community and mapping them to membership capabilities. The component code can subsequently be accessed in the context of a real user or member of the community. In this manner, a more realistic and efficient testing environment is achieved.