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Kunena – Administrator post delete clarification

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kunenaOne observation we have made since using Kunena is that one is presented with an ‘Access Denied’ message if an attempt is made to reference a non-existent Forum topic/message. We wanted to investigate this further since we wanted  to get a 404 redirection defined such that the URL could be redirected either to a full ‘404’ page or an alternative Forum post.

We started out creating a new forum post which we then wanted to ‘delete’.  This led us to a different puzzle since our Forum administrator was unable to ‘delete’ the post.

Being a little puzzled about why our Kunena administrator couldn’t see an option to delete a post I have delved a little deeper to understand what was going on with specific checking on the ability to ‘delete’ posts.

First there is a small question of the definition of what an administrator is!  There is the understanding of a Joomla administrator (super user) and it seems that Kunena mixes the definition with that of a Kunena administrator. To our minds they are two separate roles. 

It is possible for a user to be defined as a Kunena administrator and this is completely separate from that of a Joomla administrator.  However certain features such as the ability to ‘delete’ posts are specifically checked within Kunena as to whether the User is a Joomla administrator before deciding whether to display the delete option(s).

This is handled differently from that of a Forum moderator who if Kunena is configured appropriately will display the ‘delete’ option(s) for a forum post.

By default we do not allow Joomla administrator (super users) to login to the Front end of our site, with the result that on our forum our ‘forum administrator’ was unable to ‘see’ the ‘delete’ option(s).  Our Forum administrator was also a ‘moderator’ but because our forum was only configured to display the ‘delete’ to administrators, it was not visible to them.

So to enable the delete option we need to configure Kunena so that ‘moderators’ can delete posts.  In our site this means that our Kunena administrators must be moderators if we wish then to be able to delete forum posts.

There are two delete options, the first to enter the item into a ‘trash’ and the second to ‘empty ‘ the trash, i.e. permanently delete the post item.  Since moderators cannot (never)  ‘permanently delete item’ it is necessary in our case to empty the ‘trash’ from the back end of the site.

Is is also perhaps to explain that there are two separate things: administrator rank and forum administrator. Rank can be set to any user and it's just used to display text and image.

Real administrators can be recognised in the default template from their name: it has a red color code.

If the color is brown, it means that the user is a global moderator -- not an administrator. In this situation the rank can be changed by clearing up the special admin rank for the user.

Kunena uses the following criteria for 'real' administrators from these users:

* Users who are in 'Super Users' or 'Administrator' user groups
* User belongs to user group which have rights to 'Kunena > Options' actions (either one)
* Users who have #__kunena_user_categories.role=2 in a category (not believed to be really used yet)
* Users who are granted administrative rights by integration

However having gained a better understanding of the ‘delete’ problem, we are still left with the original question of why we cannot introduce a redirection for a non-existent post identifier. Attempts with sh404SEF, the standard Joomla redirection Manager and even Akeeba Admin tools Pro all fail to capture the URL and implement the defined redirection.

Tags:
joomla Kunena Forum
MySQL and JSON data structures
Oracle–Flashback Query

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Geoffrey Chapman

Geoffrey Chapman

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An IT professional with a wide experience of IT systems, specialising in Database Management and Security.

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