I was following a tutorial about nodes and compositing but I found in my Blender version there is no shader menu. What is causing this is it a bug (I have Blender 2.68) or are my settings wrong?
Can’t tell what your settings are. Are you in Cycles or Blender Render, up at the top of your screen? Are you in material nodes or compositor nodes?
Cycles render.
I see under materials the settings for nodes, it seems I can add nodes like mix shade or the others but only in the left panel. The thing is I have to choose the setting of a material first. I would rather see how to add a shader to a group, the object(s) are a group so i could append them from another blendfile.
Are there more possibilities that I can make one mesh of it, including lamps and then add shaders to it with nodes?
Make sure you have switched Node editor to show material nodes, not image compositing.
Any assigned materials will follow Appended objects (or Group of objects).