Sphene Community Tools

I try to create forums for users based on their membership in different clans/(forum-)groups, which means that some forum-categories only are visible to some users, but they still are member of a specific (community-)group.

I was a bit confused, which mechanism I should use for this. Where do I define roles for this? E.g. if a set of users have access to one additional category?

Basicly the ability to select certain forum-categories for certain users (moderator internal forums, clan categories, etc.) should be possible somehow I think, but I still can't really figure out, how the "sphene way" of doing this is. (how the ACL works)

(I repeated myself, to get it clear, my english is bad)

well .. i think what you are looking for are 'role groups' :)
(sorry for the bad naming ;) )

so you could create a role group called 'Clan X Moderators' which have all role permissions assigned to all categories meant for 'Clan X' .. does this make sense to you ?

well i saw now, that the role permissions are very simple, but one can extend the category class and write a more detailed ACL into it, using the right functions (allow_post and so on). So basicly I dont really know how roles could be used without implementing an own category class, since the only thing roles can define is allowing posting or answering in groups.

groups however in terms of a forum are "one forum", since you can after installation only display one group at a time in one forum (of course, I know you can do that manually and display many groups after each other).

so basicly defining roles in one group only allow certain users to post in every thread of the group. maybe i understood your code incorrectly... I dunno.

I will use a custom category class and check for certain roles in the functions which are called if a user is allowed to post and so on.

umm no.. i think roles should work perfectly out of the box for you .. (if not it's time to fix them :) )

let's try it a simple way .. let's say you have three forum categories .. A, B, C :) and in the django admin you define the "normal" permissions so that nobody can see them..
then you have a user 'user1' you want to have read permissions for A and B .. and post permissions for C ..

so you click on 'Manage Roles' (/community/admin/permission/role/list/) and create two new roles.. one ('viewerrole') with 'sphboard_view' and a second role ('posterrole') with 'sphboard_view', 'sphboard_post_threads' and 'sphboard_post_replies'.
after that.. you would click on 'manage members' of 'sphboard_view' and 'Add Member' now enter 'user1' as username .. and check 'has limitations' - this will reload the form and allow you to define that this role is only applicable for the forum A .. now again click 'add Member' with the limitation for forum B ...

and then the same for the second role and forum C :)


to make the whole process only once.. instead of for every user.. do the same with 'role groups' instead of users...

i hope this explains how roles should work :)

Ah, so thats it! I understand. I missed the "role groups" themselves - maybe that's why I thought, it does not work.

I did not saw them in /admin/ - is there no admin interface for role groups?
I saw, I can change/create them with the community tool, however.

Of course, my goal is to automate rolegroups, since I want to have each user a set of "avatars" and "clans", which themselves represent rolegroups on their own, and set them for the user automagically, so I will dig deeper into that (but now I know where to start).