To implement Jforum membership forums, I used the Jforum administration console
to created my three categories: 1) Announcements, 2) General Forums, and 3) Help and Support. Then, I created my global forums and a Global group, and I assigned the global forums to the Global group. Next, I created a sample set of membership forums and a membership group, and I assigned the membership forums to the membership group. Below, I call this group Bootstrap and the forums Bootstrap Forums.
With all of this in hand, I went through many group permission configurations
for my Bootstrap Group to simplify things as much as possible. Thanks to two
posts by Monroe (16/07/2007 - Re:going bonkers on role-permissions!, and
19/02/2007 - Re:User/Group/Forum setup directions from mysql), I knew to look
in permissions.xml and several jforum database tables, especially jforum_roles
and jforum_role_values.
The end result is that the following permissions (jforum_roles.name) are needed
for each forum in its particular group (remember I restricted many Jforum
capabilities):
perm_attachments_enabled (I could have left this as a later improvement.)perm_forum (This permission is key to allowing a group to see a forum) perm_read_only_forums (The name of this permission implies that a forum is read only, but just the opposite is true. Without this permission, a user cannot reply or create forum topics.)perm_reply_only (Like the above read only permission, this permission negates reply only. Without this permission, a user can only reply to forum topics. New topics cannot be added.)
I will not go into how to set group permissions to get the above limited set.
The Administration Group Permissions Control page lives up to its
caveat: "To correctly configure access options is not a trivial task...". This
little exercise convinced me to not ever give administration capabilities to
any of my users.
In my application (my_app), I write directly to Jforum database tables to create
new groups and new users. I will not get into the intricate relationships
between jforum_roles and jforum_role_values. (Suffice it to say, I think I have it
right so far.) I use the above Bootstrap Group and Bootstrap Forums
as models. I could let Jforum SSO create new users, but I thought it would be too
much to have to tell SSO about which groups to assign a new user. So far, I have only
had to write the SSO module as prescribed, and I have not had to touch any
delivered Jforum
Java code.
My database is Mysql 5.0, and I use
JDBC Driver (Connector/J) and standard Java
result set code. Will I get into trouble with Jforum's use of Hibernate or any
caching done by Jforum by writing new membership groups and new users directly
to the Jforum database tables from my_app?
As always, any suggestions and/or comments are appreciated.
Thanks,
Danny
[originally posted on jforum.net by dhhoyle]