I'd like to see OG forums allow for easy administration (i.e. on an administration page) so that group forums (not just forum topics) can be set as public or private for either reading or writing. I would also like to be able to administer forum menus, as the default menu (which seems not to be editable) presents a dizzying array of choices. I want to be able to customize my OG forum menus the same way I can customize my navigation menu.

Comments

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

I guess in this post you are addressing a couple of things.

First, access control for containers and forums. I'm looking into how OG handles access control for other issues. May be of use on this as well.

Second, forum menu administration. I'm not sure you mean forum menus as there isn't much to choose from. Do you mean group menus? That would be for the OG issue queue. For starters, you can check out my Content Type Administration by Organic Group module if the OG menu is in fact what bothers you.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I think having an option that allows you to set forums to private or public would be great! I have groups that have most of their content available to the public, only some postings are only for group members. With the current setup that means that people could in theory see the public postings, but as they don't have a way of accessing the hidden forum they will most likely miss the content that is available to them, simply because they can't see it...

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

So to lay out a plan to take care of this:

1) Provide an admin UI where each forum and container can be set to public or private. If private is set, the regular operation occurs, if public is set, all children without its own setting will have forums and containers publicly browseable and every post will default to a 'public' audience setting if 'audiences' are used.
2) Set the audience appropriately based on 1) above at new node creation. Allow/deny changing the setting based on user perms.
3) Allow/deny viewing forums and containers based on 1) above.

Am I forgetting anything?

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Seems ideal to me!

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

This won't make it into the official 2.0 release unless someone else rolls a patch. There's actually quite a bit to add/change to get this to work. I'm in the middle of something else for the next couple of weeks at least, so I'll only be working here-and-there on the 2.0 release. I figure these features will likely not happen until Aug-Sept.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I am happy to to any testing and support you - unfortunately my PHP skills are rather mediocre, so I wouldn't be of much use for the programming part.

mightyiam’s picture

mightyiam commented

My community will be looking forward to this feature.

Thanks!

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

And so will be mine!

In the meantime, if anyone here has a tip on how I could change the current 5.x-2.x-dev so that all forums are shown by default, I would be very happy! Don't mind whether it is quick and dirty, as long as it does show the forums.

A workaround - but this seems very quick and dirty to me - could be to delete all the code from

/**
 * Implementation of hook_db_rewrite_sql().
 *
 * Restricts forum viewing by organic group.

to

    else {
      $og_vocab = FALSE;
      return NULL;
    }
  }
}

This does the following: All group containers and forums are now visible to outsiders, you can see the number of postings, the time of the last posting etc. However, you do still have to be a group member to go inside the forums. This is a big improvement for me as outsiders now can see at least that there is something they are missing.

There are still two problems with this approach:
a) when group members or even managers click on the link to their group forums on the OG navigation menu they get the message "Access denied" - meaning, they can see the group forums but not the container, which they of course should be able to see.
b) when non group members click on a group forum they also get "Access denied." It would of course be nice if instead they would get a message telling them that they need to subscribe to a group in order to see its content.

Any ideas?

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented
Version: 5.x-1.3 » 5.x-2.x-dev
Assigned: Unassigned » rconstantine

Alright, there are three steps to this:

1) Create the admin UI to mark forums and containers as public - that's easy.

2) Store the settings - I want your input here. I'm thinking some sites have enough forums that adding an entry to the variables table would not be ideal - i.e. I should make a new table to track this data. Thoughts???

3) Allow viewing but not posting for all users in forums and containers marked as public - this is going to be a pain in the neck.

I'm going to upload a new dev version without this feature since I'd like everyone to test what other changes I've made while I wait for your input here on this matter.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Horrah for 1)!

I cannot really comment on 2) as I don't understand Drupal well enough in terms of what adding a table would do to the system.

3) Would be great to have. If 1) means that outsiders could at least see that there is a container with X forums and Y postings then that would be something very helpful for me until 3) is working properly. Would that mean that only registered users will be able to see group forums or anonymous users too? I hope it can be the latter option!

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

All points are tied together and are just steps in making it happen. Without 3, 1, and 2 are pointless. 1 is only marking them, not actually showing them. 2 is storing those marks. 3 is using the marks to let normally-unauthorized users see them. Does that make more sense? It seems I confused you.

Anyway, step 1 is done - the admins have a checkbox on the relevant forms to mark the forum or container as public. Now I need to figure out 2, so I can store the data. Once that's done, 3 will take quite a bit of doing - and thinking.

As for anonymous users seeing the forums and stuff, I think so. Otherwise it isn't really public right?

At least, if you allow anonymous users to 'view content' they should see them. But I think if you don't allow that to anon's that they shouldn't. That's how I'll implement it.

So for now, I'm going to rest a bit on this module. I've got seven others that need updating.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I understand/understood that 1, 2 and 3 are linked, although I was indeed not entirely sure whether 1) would mean that non-group members could at least see the group forums as that is what currently keeps me from switching to the latest version (if people cannot see that there are discussions they will not join these discussions).
Regarding the anonymous users I just wanted to check as we seem to approach this from a different angle: For me forums are public unless I change that and even then outsiders should see that there is a forum and that it has content. Your needs seem to be exactly the opposite, that's why I wanted to check!

Anyway, thanks again for your work and sorry that I can't be much help regarding 2). Separate tables seem like a good idea from a general point of view, but I don't have any special Drupal knowledge in this field

mightyiam’s picture

mightyiam commented

Sorry, I got confused. We have forums which we would like to be public.

We have 2.0 installed. What do I need to do to make a forum public?

I'm sorry for the nagging, it's just that it really escapes me...

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

Are you thinking that the steps I outlined are for you? They are not. They are programming steps that I need to take to make this possible. The first part is done and may have been included in the last dev on accident. The other two programming chores still need doing. The creation of a new database table isn't too bad. But that last task is a big one as it touches many parts of the existing program.

So like I said, I'll get to it when I can. I'm pushing against some deadlines for the next several weeks and won't be able to get to it for some time. That's why I released a new official version without it.

mightyiam’s picture

mightyiam commented

I didn't think that :/. I thought that making og forums public was all done and released in 2.0. Mainly because 2.0 adds such a permission to the permissions table.

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

I'll have to see about removing the UI stuff so I don't confuse others. I should have the feature done later this month though. So hang in there. My deadlines come up in two weeks. After that, I should have time.

mightyiam’s picture

mightyiam commented

Thank you for your blessed work, my friend.

neurojavi’s picture

neurojavi commented

Please read this forum post http://drupal.org/node/183245 for a discussion about Audience improvement.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Hi! I just wanted to check about the progress with the new admin options - is there anything I could do, i.e. very early code to test or something similar?

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

I am working on this right now. This will be in the next release!!! Give me just a couple of days to get it out.

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

The back end is nearly finished. I'll pick this up again in the morning.

All I have left are:
- reset of group admin-set private forums to default forums (an admin tool)
- adjust nodeapi function to allow for automatically setting forums and containers to public (based on an admin setting)
- actually filtering the forums based on the public-ness in order to view them (this is the hard part)
- since I'm going to display titles for all posts, regardless of public/private nature of individual post, mark which are which visually (icon)

I'm actually going to get around to a full blown README a la my other modules (they're quite lengthy and robust), so don't worry; everything old and new will be covered.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

That sounds great. I especially like the icon idea!

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

Well, shoot. Everything is finished except I ran into a problem where entries in the node_access table are interfering. Basically, I don't want to touch that table just to show a listing of nodes, especially since I'm not allowing users to actually view private nodes, just see them listed in forums.

So I need to figure that out, then make sure my public/private 'tags' on the posts are working as they should - i.e. not showing for subscribed group members since they can see all posts to a group. It looks like I won't be doing icons, but I will put the option in where if you have icons of a certain name in the og_forum directory, it will use them. The main reason is that the icons I'm using are licensed non-GPL-compatible, so they can't be included. If someone wants to whip up public and private icons, I could include them in the release. I think they should be 16X16 in size - definitely no more than 20X20.

Wish me luck. I really like how it's all turning out.

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

Ha! I totally mis-diagnosed that one. Turns out I simply overlooked adding one more condition to an if statement - I thought I already had done it. Dropped it in and all features work as I expect - related to that anyway. There's one more thing to check, then I'll release a dev version that I hope some of you will test so I can do an official release. Look for the dev soon.

For those interested, the problem that remains is in showing group posts not marked as public. As a minimum, I'd like for the posts to be listed in the forums and marked as private even if clicking on them results in an access denied page. At least users will get used to the marker and see the titles of posts they're missing out on. The marker is working fine at present for users that are already members of the group and are authorized to see the page. Or rather, it's not working because users belonging to a group shouldn't need to know which posts are private and which are public. Hmm. Anyway, I hope to be done today. Looks like it was good to have shelved this for a couple of days since I found the real issue.

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented
Status: Active » Fixed

Finally. Look for a dev.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

That is excellent news. I look forward to install and test the new dev release as soon as it is online (or did I miss it?)!

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

You didn't miss it. Will get it out later today.

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

It's out, but Drupal only makes a new tar every twelve hours for dev releases. Look for it.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Thank you so much for this - it looks great! Really helpful and so far almost everything works fine. I did not have time to explore everything in detail, just two things that I noticed:

1) The page listing all the forums displays the text "here we are 2" above the list of forum containers. This is where it comes from:

elseif ($restrict && !$all_public){
      drupal_set_message('here we are 2');

Could this not be removed? I am not quite clear about the purpose...

2) I run a general discussion forum on my site, all the others are group related. Unfortunately, with the setting allowing the group moderators to choose whether their forums are public or not, there is no way to set this for the general, non og, forum - and in that all postings now are marked as private...

More later after I have had more time to look around. Again, great work!

rconstantine’s picture

rconstantine commented

Oops. That was a debug entry. I also had 'here we are 1' because I was trying to figure out which of two functions was called first (I don't have a working debugger installed for Eclipse IDE). Please remove that!!!

I'll throw another dev out with it taken out.

Wait a minute. Site-wide forums should not get any kind of marking because they do not have entries in the og_term table at all - which is where we keep track of publicity. In all of my tests, site-wide forums remain totally public regardless of settings from this module. What indications do you have that they are private?

Looking at my tests again... I see all site-wide forums marked with a 'public' tag. Perhaps you could elaborate on your settings and forum structure. Oh, and please open a new issue for any problems (like this one), so I can track it separately.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Thanks for that! I have created a new bug report for the public/private things at
http://drupal.org/node/202085

Otherwise it all seems to work great!

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented
Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for two weeks with no activity.