Unauthorized users see extra buttons on /forum

I've attached a patch to #1167350: Action links were ignored , it will fix this problem

I picked this up from http://core.drupalofficehours.org/task/1238 and have made a first attempt. This simply moves the access checking into the template. I have no idea if this is the best/correct/etc. way of doing it so welcome reviews!

Here's another version which turns the "Log in" into an action (and fixes the link code) so only moves the not authorised message to the template.

I applied the patch in #6, created the Test user and tested as anonymous as well as logged in as the Test user and the results were the same as indicated in #7.

I've taken a first go at merging patches #1853072-6: Unauthorized users see extra buttons on /forum and #953214-50: shows 'login to post new content in the forum' even when it's not true. I've attached an interdiff file but first time created one so not sure if it worked ok.

If authenticated user has access to post new forum content and visitors can register on the site the action button now redirects to /user and looks like this:

...and if Administrator only registrations then it redirects to /user/login and looks like this:

The buttons are still somewhat confusing as you could have comments on forum topics where you can post, this just checks for posting of topics.

The result of the discussion in #1167350: Action links were ignored was that Forum module should not use hook_menu_local_tasks_alter() to expose/show these links in the first place, because these are not action links.

So what we want to do here is to move that code to an entirely different spot, but essentially try to retain the approximate position.

The most simple approach would be to move the code into an own helper function (i.e., renaming the current hook implementation function), make it accept a $build render array, and make it add a container that contains the respective link or markup, depending on the configuration settings, and apply a very low negative weight to the container. (i.e., essentially doing what the current action links are doing, just without action links.)

Then, inject calls to this helper method from every forum page callback that needs it.

That would be the most simple way. However, I want to amend that this messaging is not really part of the actual page callback content (which is probably more or less the reason for why it has been moved into hook_menu_local_tasks_alter()).

Therefore, an alternative approach would be to turn this container into a real and new block, which just outputs the necessary link/content, and make forum_install() enable and position that block into the 'content' region with a low weight. As a result, site builders and themers will be able to move this messaging block very easily to a different place/region (e.g., into a sidebar).

Overall, the block approach would make more sense to me.

Fixing white space issues in patch and status change to needs review

Had introduced dependency on block module which also affected other tests. Re-trying.

So *that's* why I see those "Fixing new line issue" posts.

I totally agree, I was just following orders ;)

Do you have any alternative suggestions? I know what mine would be, but guess we'd better keep forum for the moment :D

Me too which is why I just did the patch, sounds like best idea is to leave it for a while to see how other things develop. If you want me to look at anything in particular feel free to use my contact form or mail steve@purkiss.com and I'll take a look, quite enjoyed getting my teeth into this even though it did give me a little bit of a shock when I realised it broke lots of tests due to the block dependency - all good learning though!

@stevepurkiss: Forum containers + forums are taxonomy vocabularies, forum posts are nodes. Both vocabularies and nodes are entities in D8, so that's done already. However, that's off-topic here. :)