Thought I'd start some constructive Joomla discussion.
I have only used a CMS for about 6 months, and that has all been Joomla. I'd never heard of Drupal until listening to Geeks&God, and have since experimented with it slightly. The church site I made and maintain is Joomla, and has been great so far. Currently, though, I'm running into a few problems with it, and am not sure if this is because my site is outgrowing Joomla in terms it's functionality and need for customisation, if I don't have the expertise needed to implement some of the features i see in Drupal into my Joomla site.
One specific problem I am having is with user access and rights.
Listening to the Drupal series, and experimenting with it, I know it allows you to set Roles with specific permissions for each role.
Joomla only allows me to have levels of users as: Register, Author, Publisher, Administrator, Super-Administrator.
I was wondering if Joomla allows more customisation of user roles. For example, I want to allow a Youth Worker to publish a blog, but no-one else, but would prefer him not have edit access to every other part of the website
Or I would like the head of the Boy's group to be able to edit the Boy's Ministry page to update that information, but no other pages.
Is any of this accomplishable through Joomla, or through a Joomla Extension?
Thank You - Lets get the constructive Joomla conversations started!
Paul Vaartjes
Thanks!
As I type this I sigh relief....thanks paul! I appreciate someone pushing this into a positive realm. I don't have an answer for you (sorry!), but I just wanted to say thanks for the new direction.
-Rob Feature
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.mustardseedmedia.com
Some possible ways maybe. I
Some possible ways maybe. I haven't tried these out myself, but you might want to look into the following.
JACLPlus
JUGA
Partially cover it
As I understand it, flexible access control is not part of the core architecture of Joomla. This is one of the places I'd expect Joomla to make some giant leaps forward in the future.
There was an overview presentation given at the Gospelcom Internet conference this past fall. Part of this discussed Joomla. You can get the slides here and the audio here.
The speaker is someone who builds sites with Joomla. In the overview slides Access Control is one of the Joomla weaknesses. In most of the Joomla reviews I've read access control is called out as a chief Joomla weakness.
According to what I have read, since it's not part of Joomla at the core you either get an add on that partially does it or a core hack. I'd really like to see this as an improvement in the future. It would make Joomla a lot more powerful.
Has anyone used these extensions? I'm curious how they work in practice.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
JUGA - Joomla User Group Access
JUGA allows you to create an infinite number of User Groups for both the Front-end of your Joomla! website *and* the Administrator control panel.
After defining groups, it only takes a few clicks to assign page access rights and users!
JUGA finally provides Joomla with the ACL you've all been looking for.
Check it out at http://www.dioscouri.com/juga/
Not Free
The only problem is you have to be a 'Charter Member' to get an up to date version or one for Joomla 1.5.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
juga is pretty good for what i need
it's true you have to pay for it, but they are very supportful and helped me out with configuring it when i had a problem. there software does everything i need including allow me to restrict submissions and viewing to specific users. they even logged into my site for me to help figure out what i was doing wrong. they are very much worth it and they are making new features for it all the time. does exactly what you want.