Hi,
Thanks for the inquiry. I appreciate it. You asked some tough questions. I will do my best to answer them.
Do you know the meaning of life?42
Will Nice Memberships work ok with JomSocial?Yes and no. The Nice Memberships extension takes full advantage of Joomla's ACL for handling user permissions/access. However, Jomsocial does not fully integrate with with Joomla ACL, at least not when we tested JomSocial v2.4 RC1. Below is an excerpt from our SQA report for Nice Memberships with JomSocial.
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Discovery 1A new member creates a new account, confirms it via e-mail and logs into the
community for the first time – and gets redirected to Nice Memberships Redirect in
order to subscribe. Fine for so far.
But if exactly this new member ignores the redirect and enters
http://www.mydomain.com into his browser, he gets of course immediate access to the community without
payment. So, with a tiny little bookmark, our subscription process gets a hard kick.
Why?
Because a registered user assigned to REGISTERED can use the community of
which the access is of course assigned to PUBLIC ACL without any need to be found
in our new group COMMUNITY some time…
Attempted Work AroundsAs mentioned before JomSocial adds a new menu item to Joomla!´s core main menu
name “JomSocial”. The ACL for that ist PUBLIC. Since this is necessary to see the
community at all, this cannot be changed to REGISTERED or COMMUNITY. If you
do so, you get a 404 problem of course for those who are not logged-in.
JomSocials features can be accessed via the JomSocial toolbar. The JS toolbar
appears as a menu toolbar to logged-in users in the front-end. Here is where they
navigate.
In the backend, JS toolbar appears to the administrator as a new item in
Adminitration -> Menus. The JS toolbar contains all the features like profile,
messages, friend etc. as separate sub menu entries with own ACL!
I changed all the sub menu´s ACL to COMMUNITY ACCESS (see below) without
touching the JomSocial ACL (public) in the main menu. What I expected was that
users could skip the Nice Memberships Redirect by tricks and get to the community -
but getting an immediate error message “Restricted Access” by JomSocial since they
are not assigned to group COMMUNITY yet (which is only done by payPal
subscription). So the redirect should of course appear as long as users do not
subscribe.
Discovery 2If I change the ACL for third party extensions in JomSocial to COMMUNITY, not yet
subscribed users cannot see this extensions appear in the frontend – the way it
should be! If I change their group assignments manually from REGISTERED to
COMMUNITY, the extensions are visible to them!
ConclusionJomSocial internal settings (like user privacy etc. somehow beat the Joomla! ACL
settings. No idea whether this is intended or still has to be fixed in JomSocial 2.4. But
I really suppose that the JomSocial component is not quite integrated to Joomla 1.7
ACL management…
So is Nice Memberships now working with JomSocial?
YES, I think so, but JomSocial 2.4 RC1 might have an ACL problem in the
first line…(see the JS tollbar ACL settings). Need to verify this in JS 2.4 Release.
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If you're findings are different, I would love to hear about them. Please keep me posted as to your progress.
~ Thanks
