Hi,

I am really looking at coming over to Joomla from my e107 site, the only thing that is preventing me from doing so at this point is that Fireboard doesn't have native forums.

I dont really want to have multiple solutions in my site (i.e. SMF or PHPBB bridged into Joomla). So I need to have private forums, whilst GroupJive and other solutions achieve it in a round-a-bout way and don't really achieve it how it needs to be done.

Therefore I am left with one solution and that is to code this ability into the component.

I am going to add a fairly simplistic adding, rather than having groups I am going to have the users added directly to the list of the users who have access to the Private forum.
This isn't a 100% ideal way, I guess as having User Groups and then adding the group to a forum is best, but this should at least give me what I need as I have no more than 10 users per forum.

The forum will be hidden from all but Super Administrators and the users listed.


This should be fairly easy to achieve, once I am done I will need a few testers and hopefully we can get this included in the core, if not hopefully we can get the main dev team to have a look at it as an idea, it could easily be adapted to use groups later.

I am aiming also to keep on re-coding the feature for each new version and will distribute it each time.

Please let me know if you are interested and or have any comments. I am kind of hoping that in return for doing this someone might be keep to help me with a template for my site, if not oh well.

Dan

Make sure you take into account the latest/recent posts add-ons that seem to be able to "bypass" the "private/restricted" nature of the forum and show ALL posts whether they are hidden or not.

Yup it looks like I will be able to control everything through the "fb_auth" class

I may not need to make any major modifications and can just use this file for all of that, though there may be a little bit of tweaking of this needed to get the user ID in there rather than the aro groups.

If this is the case the modification will be extremely easy to test. I am leaving for the day in about 15 minutes, so hoping I can run a very basic test by then

I added the changes to Auth.

So at the moment it does the following

- Users in the list can enter and view the forum as per usual

- Users not in the list can not enter the forum, but can see it in the list.

So it is a very promising start, I will have to work further on this to remover further access. I was hoping the "is_auth" was going to be used on every check of forum display and access but doesnt look like the case

Will update as I find more

Before I left I had it working as a test case from auth classes, however then came across the permissions class.

Looks like I will be 100% able to achieve what I need to from the permissions class. Am going to try it out tomorrow but it pretty much looks like I will have this working within a few days

Thanks for working on this. Just a note:

Would it be better to hide the forum totally from users that are not in the list?

and please use the latest SVN

all the best

That is the plan, just one step at a time. Hopefully should have something today, once I have it working I will strip it back to a sep class/function and then use that where needed

danialt wrote:
and please use the latest SVN

all the best

Yep good idea, I was thinking that last night, I will grab that shortly

Just thought I would check in to let you know where I am at.

So far these are the changes I have made

1 - Add file fb_restrict.php (this checks for restricted forums and if the users has access)
2 - fb_auth.php alters the authorization to check for restricted forums via fb_restrict.php (admin and super admins have access regardless of any other restriction (this is keeping with the Joomla core principles, if requests are high I will alter this too, though more core modfications need to be made to achieve this)
3 - Same as above

Left to do. I would have finished this today but I had a lot of my work for my real job (don't you hate when that gets in the way).
But all I have to do is make the admin screen and make sure that the upgrade process works properly, I will be releasing as my own release, because the dev release branch is not in sync. I will try to make it all pretty easy, as in upload this, run this, delete this.

I am away for the weekend, but will hopefully have this released very early next week, sorry for the delay, I would usually have this done by now, just been a hectic week.

Dan