[SOLVED] Controlling access to connections using CBSubs

This topic is partially covered in:

www.joomlapolis.com/forum/89-use-cases/148815-no-connections-for-basic-plan

but its a matter that I'd like some near term advice on.

For purposes of this discussion, we have two subscription plans, one basic and one advanced.

We'd like to limit Community Builder's Connections capability to be strictly usable by those with an advanced subscription.

As Krileon outlines in the discussion thread above, this is a two part problem:

First, the Connections Tab needs to be protected with the CBSubs Fields Tabs Protection plugin. We have implemented this first part successfully.

However, the second part of the challenge relates to Connections itself as it appears throughout Community Builder. There is of course a Connections button beside the Edit button on the profile - one would hope we could suppress that.

Krileon notes in the thread above that:

"Once done you'll need to use the CBSubs Content integration and on the Extensions integration tab of your plan you'll need to protect the following url with By URL Part.

option=com_comprofiler&act=connections&task=addConnection"

We've tried this, and don't seem to be getting any discernible results. We'd appreciate some more detailed guidance in this second part in making Connections only available to subscribers of the Advance plan.

Thanks,
Ted

You'll need to protect all the URLs associated with connects. This will NOT protect the the pop-up that appears asking for users to supply a message with their connection request or anything of the sort. It would prevent the user from actually sending the connection request however. The below URLs are what you'd need to protect.

option=com_comprofiler&task=manageconnections
option=com_comprofiler&task=addconnection

The above should protect the add link and the manage links regarding connections. Beyond this not much more I can suggest, sorry.

As we've experimented with your suggested solution, we were having some difficulty suppressing the addconnection operation, which you indicated in this thread should be formatted:

option=com_comprofiler&task=addconnection

That didn't seem to work for us. But then we looked to the other thread discussion on this topic ( www.joomlapolis.com/forum/89-use-cases/148815-no-connections-for-basic-plan ) and saw there you referred to the expression:

option=com_comprofiler&act=connections&task=addConnection

Which seems to work suppressing adding connections through CBSubs.

Thus, two questions:

First -

Should "option=com_comprofiler&task=manageconnections" actually be "option=com_comprofiler&act=connections&&task=manageconnections? What does the act=connections represent in this expression?

Second,

Is there a reference where we can review the different tasks under connections by option= reference?

Thank you.

I see, wasn't aware it was case sensitive; my mistake. You don't need to include act= as far as I am aware. The below is the case sensitive versions of the URLs you'd need to protect.

option=com_comprofiler&task=addConnection
option=com_comprofiler&task=addconnection
option=com_comprofiler&task=removeConnection
option=com_comprofiler&task=removeconnection
option=com_comprofiler&task=denyConnection
option=com_comprofiler&task=denyconnection
option=com_comprofiler&task=acceptConnection
option=com_comprofiler&task=acceptconnection
option=com_comprofiler&task=manageConnections
option=com_comprofiler&task=manageconnections
option=com_comprofiler&task=saveConnections
option=com_comprofiler&task=saveconnections
option=com_comprofiler&task=processConnectionActions
option=com_comprofiler&task=processconnectionactions

CB supports all of the above tasks, have provided both version of each task that CB accepts. When protecting 1 you should also protect the lowercased.

Actually, we saw it not an issue of case sensitivity, but the addition of the "&act=connections" in the string.

option=com_comprofiler&task=addconnection

versus

option=com_comprofiler&act=connections&task=addConnection

I frankly didn't notice the "c" versus "C". But we'll experiment with it.

We were assuming that the addition of the "&act=connections" was what made it work.

Very likely the case; it has no significance for the protection of the URL and is just a variable used internally in PHP. Excluding it should have no adverse affects.