Plan Access Question

J2.5.16 CB1.9.1 CBS3.0.0

I need some guidance on the use of the two dropdown settings on the Plan | Access tab, vis:
Visible for Access Level:
Visible for Group (and above this group):

The CBS 3.0 Manual p365 only refers to the latter as follows:
"Visible for Group (and above this group): [initial value: Public Front-end]
This drop-down field parameter is used to specify which CMS ACL group this
plan is visible to. For example, one concept we can formulate with this setting
is to have plans that are only visible for members that belong to the ‘Author’
ACL group. Of course such a plan should (obviously) also be excluded from
being presented during the website registration process."

In particular I was trying to restrict access to "staff plans", so that only Super Users could subscribe a Joomla user via the backend to a staff plan. I initially had these set to Special and Super User respectively, but could not then as a super user go to the user's profile and then assign the plan to them. Only when I dropped this down to Registered for both did I seem to be able to do this. This doesn't sound right and I do not want a staff member to be able to assign a staff plan to another user.

I note a different behaviour between when I am creating a new user or trying to modify an existing user (without any current subscriptions). In the first case I can see the staff plans but when I select one I get an error message on Saving (see attached). In the second case I do not see the staff plans unless they have Access levels of Registered/Registered.

These staff plans are not available at front end Registration. A further lesser issue is that when a staff user (on one of these plans) goes to their profile and to their subscription tab, they are offered the opportunity to upgrade to the more expensive member plans which are not relevant. Can I prevent any of the normal upgrades from showing for a staff plan?

For Joomla 2.5+ you want to use "Visible for Access Level:" only. Set "Visible for Group (and above this group):" to "Public" then adjust "Visible for Access Level:" as needed. If you need a specific usergroup then create a new view access level and select it.

Can I prevent any of the normal upgrades from showing for a staff plan?

Yes, edit your plans and on the Workflows tab add a condition to check if your staff plan is active.

Who is supposed to be assigning the staff plans and where? If it's something only high up administrators do then set it to be a backend plan only so it never shows up on frontend no matter what. Then just assign the plan from backend. This should eliminate all of your issues.

Thank you. I have done as you suggested.

I then logged into the backend as a test Member Administrator who has the appropriate Access Level to see the Staff plans. (This test Memb Adm was created when the plan had Access Level of Registered.) I tried to create a new user and as part of that creation, tried to assign the Staff General plan. On Save I receive an error message "Chosen plans combination is not allowed (you must choose coherent plans selection, e.g. parent subscriptions to a plan must be active)." What might this indicate? The Staff General plan's parent plan is Top as are all of the other plans. They are also all exclusive except for a Donation plan.

Still logged in as above and still using the CB User Mgt, when I select an existing user without a subscription and go to the subscriptions tab, and select a staff plan, I am able to save it (without any error). Is this discrepancy between new and existing users intended or the result of some mis-configuration on my part?

If all your plans are exclusive except 1 then you need to have the user subscribed to at least 1 of those plans. Exclusive for CBSubs also means Mandatory or Required.

Thanks and sorry for the delay in this response.

You didn't answer the question I meant to ask. I was puzzled at the difference in behavior in a super user not being able to assign a plan when creating a user in the backend (via CB User Mgt) but being able to do so after first saving the user without a plan. Obviously this is not a major workflow problem but I wondered if it indicated some misconfiguration on my part. I quoted the error message in my previous post.

Sounds like a selection error, but I don't know for sure. That normally happens if for example you manage to select a child plan without the parent being selected (this should happen automatically) or selecting a parent plan that is an Exclusive child plan and not selecting that child plan.