Best way to customise to create a 'closed' forum?

odeclas

I want to run Vanilla under SSO with no registration, and no content displayed to guests except the option to visit the parent site and register - ie as a pseudo-module within a bigger CMS.

Based on forum searches, I can see that there is an option to run registration as 'Closed' by editing config.php directly. This still leaves an 'Apply for membership' button, but tells them that registration is closed (registerclosed.php).

This text, and other examples (eg 'Howdy, stranger!') and other stuff on the page are no longer appropriate. I can find most of the places where I will want to do this, but I'm a little concerned that I will then have to duplicate this effort every time there is an upgrade.

Is there a simpler (or recommended) way to do this?

ithcy

You could try the Force Guest Sign In plugin, and in your dashboard, go to Registration and set it to Invitation.

odeclas

Thanks, I guess that does the job I'm after in a simpler way. The only minor issue with that solution is that I won't know if they've bounced to the login page because they have bookmarked a vanilla url or if they got there when they shouldn't and were forced there.
But that's a minor inconvenience compared to the other work I'd have needed to do. Thanks again.

JeffDunne

An easy way would be to create a views/modules/guest.php in your theme that either returns an empty string or returns whatever code you want to replace it with.

You won't need to change it after future updates.

pixeline

An even easier way would be to set all categories to be viewed only by "members" via the Permissions setting screen.

odeclas

As far as I can tell this still gives a 'No Discussions Found' on the page they first see (plus links to the Activity stream etc). Force Guest Sign In was doing exactly what I wanted on Test, but not on Dev, which is driving me a little nutso (it's actually a SSO problem, but I'll get there)

Raize

This might come in handy Walled Garden 0.1

animeh

Related to this post, I am new to Vanilla. I am taking a rather large forum site and moving it over to vanilla but the site has a few rules and few things people should know before applying for membership. I have set up "Force Guest Sign-In" so that outsiders can't see anything but I have no idea how to edit the entry page so that I can write out the rules and who is eligible for membership. Can anyone help me with this?

bobtheman

@animeh
depending on how large the forums are, I would look into mass management options and see how the development, if any, is coming about. IE. user pruning, deleting multiple users/threads at the same time. Spam management is especially needed.