Question User Groups, User Group Privileges, ACLs

Can you suggest any good ACL plugins which will work with Jomsocial and Kunena?

Hi,

I find the ACL of Joomla 1.5 extremely limiting. It only allows a certain set of categories and members can be a member of only one.

I have forums which are accessible to only a handful of members(Currently in SMF), but these members do not relate to any of the user groups within Joomla.

For instance I have a "S member" which gives them access to a specific forum, however the majority of these users are only authors for Joomla as are most of the users on my site, and i need them to stay as Authors.

I have 2 hidden forums with users granted specific case by case membership to the forum.

Given ACL in true form will not be in Joomla until 1.6 I was wondering if there was a way to grant access to view forums only if I specifically give you permissions instead of having them be a member of a specific user group.


Is this possible within the system as it is so far?

never mind. My search wasnt bringing up anything, but i found what i need now.

Cheers

can you share how you did it ? im intrested in the idea of this.

I just used an access control editor and added some new groups to the Joomla ACL. It isn't ideal because i don't want to mess with that too much before the 1.6 change.

I am going to go through the documentation when I get a chance and see how mambots interact with Kunena, I may be able to write a small and specific plugin to achieve this.

If I do I will post it here for you

Can I ask, why forum usergroups were not a part of the project?

I just can't get my head around this at the moment. Forum usergroups, permissions etc are far more complex in their requirements than Joomla website access requirements

It would have been just as simple, if not easier to create the ability to assign a forum user to a forum group and that group to the forum. Or better still add users directly to a forum.

this function as i have posted many time CAN NOT be added until it availible as part of joomla and that will not happen till J1.6 is stable and not in alpha or beta stages.

Actually it can be added. Group based forums are high in priority right after K1.6 gets out and has not much to do with J1.5 vs J1.6 question.

User groups are missing because of historical reasons (before Kunena was Kunena). It's something that will hopefully change soon.

awesome thanks for the update matias. I might hack something up for my own use on my site but look forward to this coming into mainline

Just an FYI if anyone is interested. I have started writing this into the system.

To do so I have added 3 tables

jos_fb_usergroups
jos_fb_usergroup_members
jos_fb_usergroups_forums

I could probably get away with just 2 of these, but it's better to have more tables doing less IMO and I didn't want to alter any existing tabled. We can clean this up once everyone is happy with the functionality.

On the front-end this adds 1 additional query, so far. It is a simple query within the allowedforums function which checks for forums that are group restricted and that the current user ID has access to. This then propegates across all functions that have allowed forums.

What I havent yet decided is how to mark the forum as completely private, my issue comes from forward thinking, as in Joomla 1.6 we will freely be able to add and edit the Joomla core ACL and as such we can't just assign a number like 500 to the list.

However from what I can see we can add an ACL group of "1" to the restriction of the forum and thus it will show as "hidden" unless you are a member of any usergroup who has access to that forum.

This isn't ideal so I may end up altering the current query which checks permissions to include my query and base all permissions off of that.

Groups won't be as restrictive as allowing for read/write access it's just "You have access or you dont"

Really this is the best we can do at this stage without large scale rewrites, and because I am not a developer of Kunena I didn't want to alter their code or step on any toes.

Anyway I have it working, I just need to finish the admin interface and think of the best way to choose a forums restriction but that really won't be much to decide on.

Anyway hopefully this covers enough basis for all and either the Kunena team or someone else can take what I have written and better integrate it with proper read/write permissions, I jut wanted quick and dirty without massive overheads.

Will release the changes soon