how to configure users and registration?

[ohmster]

I am sorry but the answers that I need do not seem to be in the FAQ. The owner of this blog wants it to talk to his customers and followers. He would also like comments and perhaps give viewers limited ability to post or comment. Of course he wants to be able to kick off or ban users that abuse the board but how do you do this? The only things I see are allowing people to make new blogs which we do not want, we want only the one original blog where people can comment or post their own posts.

We want a "sign up" or registration page where the user picks a username and password, supplies an email address which will be checked with an email linkback, and captcha to keep spambots out. But these new users are only allowed to make new posts, upload pictures, add links, and add comments. As it is, I have it so that people can leave comments but no email checking seems to be necessary nor even registration. This is not good because then anyone can anonymously post "Kill all purple people!" or some other racist or inflammatory remark.

Can someone please show me how to do this? Thank you.
Paul

[jondaley]

Got to watch out for those purple racists...

People have asked for a requirement to allow only registered users to comment, and we can do part of that, but the registration part is kind of a pain. In that, the easiest way to do it is to do it manually by the admin. It is likely to come in a later release, but probably not too soon. I think if it were me, I would modify the summary/registration template to hide the "extra" questions for registering a blog, and hard-code them to use the blog that already exists, and you can set the fine-grained permissions to allow them to only add new posts, edit their own posts (and not other people's), etc.

Then, if you set the permissions on the template to only show the login form to logged in users, that will prevent all humans from posting comments, but it would be possible for spammers to post.

There is a "requireemail" plugin, which does part of what you want, and if you could modify the plugin, you could force it to only accept logged-in commenters.

[ohmster]

Thanks for the help Jondaley. I will tell you a little story about installing things in these bulletin boards and my experience with lifetype. I used to host and run a phpbb on my Linux machine years ago and I remember the updates and plugins were not exactly the simplest things to install but at least they were very clear about what was to be done. I tried to install the smiley plugin for lifetype and got nowhere pretty darned quick. With PHPBB, they would give you a literal string of code to search for like this:

"commentText" id="commentText"></textarea>

You could paste this into your find box in your text editor and find it exactly, then they would tell you to insert this bit of code and you got something to paste in and without a doubt, you knew exactly where to paste it. But with lifetype and the smiley plugin for example, this is not the case and I could not get it to work. Here are what the instructions say:

Example:
Standard Template:
Add the following code to commentForm.template after commentText text area:
{if $smileys->isEnabled()}
<script type="text/javascript" src="{$url->getBaseUrl()}/plugins/smileys/js/smileys/smileys.js"></script>
<br/><label>&nbsp;</label>{$smileys->generateSmileysBar()}
{/if}

So I have to find "commentText text area" in the document commentform.template. There is no literal string like that in the document but there is something close...

name="commentText" id="commentText"></textarea></div>
<div><label for="userName">{$locale->pr("comment_username")}

Now where in there am I supposed to put the code in blue? No matter where I paste it I get a script error message at the bottom of every comment page whether a comment is posted or not.

I really appreciate the answer because this forum looks pretty dead and my hopes were not very high, but to modify templates in lifetype looks like something that I am not going to be able to do.

Yeah man, those purple racists are the worst kind!

Thanks Jon.

Paul

[jondaley]

The reason we can't have a simple "find X and replace it with Y" is because each template may or may not have the same ids, etc.

One thing you might not have figured out yet, is that you can edit templates/default/commentform.template, and all templates are "supposed" to use that commentform.template instead of providing their own, but not everyone follows that rule. But, if you edit that file, you'll get it working for a lot of the templates.

The replacement text should start with:
{if $smileys && $smileys->getEnabled()}

but I've had a hard time convincing everyone to write their documentation like that.

My guess is that you haven't "installed" the plugin yet, which simply involves going to the Administration->Plugin Center and seeing that you can see "smileys" on the list.

But, if you post the error you are getting I'll have a better shot of knowing what problem you are having instead of a wild guess.

[ohmster]

...sigh. Okay, you took the time to give me an answer so I guess now I have to follow it through. Yes, I now see enable smilies in the control panel and plugins and have enabled it. I do not see anything in a comment post page like a smilie toolbar or anyway for the user to know that smilies can be used and sample smilies for them to click on. I imagine that if one were to make a comment and use a common colon followed by a close parenthesis, you get a smilie, no? Gotta try that now, let's see what happens...

...nope. Smilie plugin is enabled and posting a colon followed by a close parenthesis yields just that, a colon followed by a close parenthesis. Maybe embedding this code will help or at least give me a toolbar of sorts? Where to put it now...

Copy and paste from actual commentform.template.

BEFORE:
name="commentText" id="commentText"></textarea></div>
<div><label for="userName">{$locale->pr("comment_username")}

AFTER:
name="commentText" id="commentText"></textarea></div>
{if $smileys->isEnabled()}
<script type="text/javascript" src="{$url->getBaseUrl()}/plugins/smileys/js/smileys/smileys.js"></script>
<br/><label for="smileysBar"></label>{$smileys->generateSmileysBar()}
{/if}
<div><label for="userName">{$locale->pr("comment_username")}

RESULTING ERROR ON ALL COMMENT PAGES:
Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message 'Sorry, could not open smiley file /home/content/j/c/b/jcboutrouille/html/lifetype//plugins/smileys/icons//emoticons.properties.php' in /home/content/j/c/b/jcboutrouille/html/lifetype/plugins/smileys/class/smileys/smileys.class.php:58 Stack trace: #0 /home/content/j/c/b/jcboutrouille/html/lifetype/plugins/smileys/pluginsmileys.class.php(161): Smileys->loadSmileySet(NULL) #1 /home/content/j/c/b/jcboutrouille/html/lifetype/tmp/1/%%3F^3F2^3F2BCD9C%%commentform.template.php(22): PluginSmileys->generateSmileysBar() #2 /home/content/j/c/b/jcboutrouille/html/lifetype/class/template/smarty/Smarty.class.php(1871): include('/home/content/j...') #3 /home/content/j/c/b/jcboutrouille/html/lifetype/class/template/template.class.php(145): Smarty->_smarty_include(Array) #4 /home/content/j/c/b/jcboutrouille/html/lifetype/tmp/1/%%63^630^630C6D67%%postandcomments.template.php(66): Template->_smarty_include(Array) #5 /home/content/j/c/b/jcboutrouille/html/lifetype/class/template/smarty in /home/content/j/c/b/jcboutrouille/html/lifetype/plugins/smileys/class/smileys/smileys.class.php on line 58

I thought at first that this was a permissions error but the chmod settings on all files and directories are no different for the smilie directory, it's subdirectories, and files within. The directory structure has not been changed as it came from the zip file so I am not sure what the problem is here. Since this is a godaddy hosted site, I do not have command line access to the server to run diagnostics and scripts but do have FTP access to it. Reverting to backup copy of commentform.template.

Thanks for your help.
Paul

[jondaley]

It seems like the theme isn't picked? It should be accessing a directory like .../plugins/smileys/icons/default/wink_smile.gif, rather than just .../plugins/smileys/icons//wink_smile.gif.

I don't use the smileys plugin myself, but is there a configuration page where you set the theme that you want to use?