Posted by Merlin on Sat Oct 7, 2006 8:29 pm.
For quite some time I've had forum moderation as a working module, but it was buried and hard to find because it was built atop the Node Access Arbitrator module which is, by necessity, a very scary module to install. It turned out the arbitrator had few problems, but I never really took down the "Don't know if this works!!!" warning, and pretty much decided not to after awhile as 4.7 and the whole node access thing is a pretty scary place. Besides, it was a proof of concept.
The Node Access Arbitrator is now integrated into Drupal 5.0. As such, I've gone ahead and turned Forum Access and ACL into their own projects. People who are experimenting with CVS HEAD might want to give these modules a look. I think this is going to be a very important module for Drupal and shaking the bugs out of it early would be a good thing.
I'm pretty pleased with how clean Forum Access is, and how easy it would be to do a whole series of these. I'm hoping people will take me up on some of the following. What I’d really like to see is either these modules created or updated to 5.0, but also 4.7 versions which use the Arbitrator.
- Buddy/Friends list integration — allows users to lock their posts to any of their buddy lists. Very LiveJournal like.
- Node Privacy by Role — at this point this is just an update to what exists, and that update would do very well to backport to using the arbitrator.
- Node Privacy by Type — a simple module that automatically makes nodes of a certain type locked to a certain set of roles. In 5.0 this could be extremely useful since it’s trivial to create new basic node types. This would make it very easy to have a couple of different types of ‘exclusive’ content with almost no work at all. This is something that Taxonomy Access is often used for now, and this method would, I think, be significantly easier. IMO, Taxonomy is not actually a good solution for determining privacy level, though it works in the 4.6/4.7 environ.
Hacking some ACL code
Why I came across this post and where I'm heading
Needing some way to restrict access rights for some nodes for a project I'm working on (using Drupal 5), I used forum_access module as a guideline to implement some "ACL by role" for generic nodes. Two evenings of coding and it seems to work. I will try to enhance it to pass some rights (update right) to users and if I think that I wont embarass myself by publishing the code will post it to drupal.org and my website for people to review and hint me on all my mistakes...
My thoughts
- Default rights by role for any node type it manages (which will be a admin choice, so that forum by example still gets managed by forum_access).
- Users with a "change acl right" (per node type) will be able to change the acl rights.
- Users with a "promote users" (per node type) will be able to give certain users rights for each node.
- I like that Buddylist idea of yours. As I'm not using Budylist as of today, I wont dive into that.
Any thoughts are welcome! Happy Xmas!
yes!
I've been dealing with the Taxonomy Access module to hide content from some user roles, and to hide content from the public area of my tests site. It's a big messy nightmare, and if you want to simply hide say, the blogs from the public, but let all authenticated users see them, you end up with all the taxonomy terms available to choose from when making a blog post (same with forums until I found the forums access module). I REALLY want to see a module that will let me set an entire node type by role by default, and then even let me tag certain nodes to certain roles (Not sure how you'd do this cleanly unless you could do a pop-up menu that let you do multiple selections, or a collapsable grid of check box items, which wouldn't be too bad).
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