Thread

Can EE be set up for a membership site to allow, for example, my Gold Members to see all posts and comments within posts in the EE Forum while allowing Silver Members to see all posts and comments with the exception of any comments made by the system admin?

Thank you.

Hi, TigerBill -

You can certainly set up data on your site to be viewable only by certain membership groups.  I wasn’t quite sure what you wanted to hide from your silver members - was this comments, or forum posts?  The forum has its own permissions system; whereas with comments you would simply do the magic in the templates.

In each Forum post, I would want to hide any responses from Silver Members that specifically came from the Forum admin or moderator. Also, would it be possible to set this up in such a way that Silver Members, would see a message saying something like “You must become a Gold Member in order to view this response” while Gold Members would simply see the actual response?

For example, Any Gold Member could see all of your responses to these posts Lisa while all Silver Members would see none of your responses but instead they would see a message telling them they need to upgrade to Gold in order to see them. Is that possible to set up with EE out of the box?

I’m not understanding still.  Are silver members also admins or moderators?

Or do you mean a member that is in the Silver group should not see any forum postings from admins or moderators?  You can do this but it would mean running your forums through the main template engine and/or using some PHP conditionals in the forum templates.  In other words - yes, it is possible, but it may take some customization.

Silver Members would not be admins or moderators just site members. But I would want them to see the warning message that they have to upgrade to Gold Membership instead of seeing the admin’s responses to any post. I would, however, still want them to have access to all of the Forum posts but they would just not be able to see the admin’s response to any post.

Would this require a great deal of customization or is it something that could easily be done by a person with a little knowledge PHP?

This isn’t available out of the box, so it would take some customization.  How much it would take depends on how you go about doing it - I have not implemented something like this so I am not sure what pitfalls you’d run into.  If you go the PHP route directly in the forums you’ll need to know how to do conditional comparisons in PHP, at the very least.

Would an easier solution be, as you said, to run the Forum through the main template engine? And, if so, would this have any detrimental effect on the rest of the functionality EE as far as blogs, etc?

Here’s that feature.  There is a note there, and what that means is that if you add a lot of processing (many weblog entries tags, etc) it can slow down the forums. In and of itself it is not going to be a problem.

Yes it would be easier in that you could use ExpressionEngine conditionals, but you’ll still need to do the comparisons and test them and make sure it works how you want it to.

Thank you. One last concern that I have. Suppose that I perform the required customization, does this mean that I would have to reapply my custom code every time the next upgrade of EE came down the pike?

Or is there anything similar to the Wordpress Parent/Child theme functionality that allows you to custom code changes to the child template without affecting your ability to upgrade the base (parent template) without affecting your custom code, which resides in the child template?

Hi, TigerBill - those customizations would be in your forum theme no matter which method you used.  So long as you saved it as your own forum theme (docs) you won’t have to worry about over-writing your changes.