Dragon Company

Hi,

I wish I could manage users as a phpbb forum with user groups, permit several choice for activate an account of a new user. (I know there is a hack for 4.5 1.0.7 but It should be present by default) etc.

For me Mambo is quite 'light' by user admin, but for the rest, it's very good

See Ya !

@+++

Drake

In my opinion Administrators should have the "power" to add/delete the users groups, to give a multi layer personalization of their site.

Drake

mmx

This is already planned for 5.0. We might see portions of this code released before 5.0 in a 4.x interim release, but I doubt it because the implementation also effects the mambo content model with specific regard to how data is categorized and stored for permissions and multilanguge support.

Gunnar

Will this usermanagement also enable administrators to create groups and sub-groups? That way we can create master groups for Clients, Consultants and Staff.

For Master-Group CLIENTS, we could have one sub-group for each company, such as "client company A, prospect company B" etc.

Then, individual employees of the clients may register and we put them in the appropriate group and sub-group.

By doing this, it will be extremely easy to communicate efficiently with ALL clients, or all members from ONE clients, or all consultants etc.

Obviously, security is a major concern, as we would not want confidential client information from one client to leak to a competitor...

Can anyone shed some light if this is included in the plans for 5.0 ? So far, all I can see from 5.0 plans is that it will support groups, which is a bit too generic..

-gunnar

mmx

That's basically what phpGACL does, and it's possible to create fine-grain permissions for groups, roles, and members. At the moment, we use the terms groups, user types, and users. I'm not sure if MOS 5.0 will use that terminology, but the phpGACL ideas are the same as yours. Basically, one can assign permissions to a group, permissions to a role and permissions to individuals. Higher or lower permissions could be applied at any point in this hierarchy (tree), so this gives a lot of lattitude in the permissions you can assign members of groups, roles or to specific members.

According to an earlier post from Andrew Eddie, they were going to implement ADODB abstraction in order to use the full phpGACL console, so I'm assuming full phpGACL support because of this.

If you monitor 4.6 CVS, you can see where they are making changes now to prepare for this. All of the various components, modules, plugins (mosbots), languages files, and templates are now categorized as elements in a tree structure with nodes akin to an XML tree. Because content from these elements will eventually be centralized in the mos_content table, content also fits into this tree structure because it resides in a lower tree level under the content component. It's my understanding that the AXO Groups for phpGACL are being used to categorize all of these elements (or rather the tree structure).

I understand that they plan to move as much of 5.0 that they feel is stable over to 4.6 before the release. It's a mystery at this point as to whether we will see better phpGACL support added to 4.6. I believe it's an all or leave it as is type of thing. If they start to move it over in 4.6, the works will probably be moved over, including the ADODB abstraction. We'll just have to wait this out. If it looks like it will happen, I'll repost in this thread because it is one of the most frequently requested feature wishes.

Gunnar

Thank you mmx for sharing your insight on this. I had a look at phpGACL at sourceforge and it fits the bill perfectly and will be the only thing "missing" from the current version.

Do you also have any news on how the userdata will be stored in the database, so that they can be easily accessible from other php applications? It would be beneficial if the users log only once to the website, and then keep their credentials across communities and project update pages.

And finally - as I am not very technical and not a programmer - will the implementation in phpGACL mean that we will be able to post personal messages to certain users using core Mambo, or will we have to look for a module or component for that?

Thanks,
-gunnar

mmx

Version 5.0 is built on top of an XML-RPC server/client, so multiple sites can talk to one another. There will be an option to have only one Admin for any number of sites and those sites can exchange user authentication information using remote procedure calls (RPCs). According to the roadmap, this is supposed to be possible across multiple sites on the same server, as well as sites located on other webservers. I think that Robert retracted the multiple webserver features as something for a later 5.0 release (seem to recall causal mention of this in a message post somewhere).

I get the impression that the admin console is sort of like a centralized hub for unifying all of the sites. It could also be a gateway for moving information between the various sites. It's also supposed to be possible to install the hub on your local machine for added security. Each site needs to have a special security key for communication with the hub and among other sites. This key is supposed to be encryted somehow. There is a thread by Robert Castley on the mamboserver.com site in the General Discussions forum with more details. You'll need to search for it because it was posted about a month and a half ago.

The user data will be stored in a database, but I'm not clear to me if each site will have its own user tables or if they will reside in the centralized Admin database. I would guess that they may be experimenting with a number of ways of handling this.

User authentication information exchanges are not the only use of XML-RPC. It is supposed to be possible to exchange various kinds of content with other sites. Gayle is working on a metabloggerapi implementation and was talking earlier about porting over the MoveableType libraries. They may also have facilities like this underway and could be thinking about it.

The other thing to note is that 4.6 contains many more bells and whistles than were originally announced. This also happened during the 4.5 alpha and beta series. We also went through numerous beta releases where new features were added based on user feedback. The 4.6 in CVS now may look nothing like the 4.6.0 release and we could see more stuff added in more point releases after the initial release.

Regarding the personal message posting, there is a component and mode suite called PMSII. Private Messaging System. PMS has also be integrated into Simpleboard for private messaging. There is an additional module for displaying the private posts a user currenty has. You might want to look into this.

Beyond this, it looks like 4.6 will have support for php mail, sendmail and SMTP. There are configuration parameters in Global Configuration in a new Mail tab. I'm not sure how far they plan to go with this yet (too early to tell). I attached a screen capture, so you can see the Mail tab.

Gunnar

Thank you again for sharing your vast knowledge on this - most appreciated!

My brain is already spinning on over-grear with all the possibilities 5.0 offers us - guess it's about time to visit Amazon.com and buy a big stack of books to start learning about programming, PHP and SQL systems

-gunnar

mmx

There is a thread on mamboserver.com (don't remember exactly where) from a user who asked for recommendations on books.

Version 4.6 is already prepped for XML docbook documentation in pkg files and at least one of those documents is supposed to deal with development. I got the impression, that these documents will show how to develop elements for 4.6 with guidelines on keeping the code portable for 5.0. This might mean explaining some mysteries about 5.0 in order to explain the differences between 4.6 and 5.0 elements (that is, building a 4.6 element so it is easier to migrate to 5.0).

There are a lot of good tutorials on phpBuilder.com to help you get started. Mambo follows Pear coding standards for the most part. You can read those on the Pear site. If you want to read the 4.6 API docs created using phpDocumentor, they are now accessible via the web. These are getting updated multiple times per day (every 4 hours or sooner I think).

http://mamboserver.com/doc/