This is a framework that takes care of all the dull bits of registering, activating, reminding, logging in and editing preferences for your site visitors.
It uses authlogic to handle sessions and provides complete interfaces both for the administrator and the visitor. The admin interface is basic and fits in with radiant. The visitor interface is more friendly (and incidentally includes a trick email field - so-called inverse captcha - that should prevent spam signups).
The visitors are referred to as 'readers' here. Readers never see the admin interface, but your site authors and admins are automatically given reader status.
The purpose of this extension is to provide a common core that supports other visitor-facing machinery. See for example our forum extension for discussions and page/blog comments, reader groups for proper page-access control and downloads extension for secure access-controlled file downloads. More will follow and I hope other people will make use of this too.
Just updated for radiant 0.8 and moved across to authlogic. I've also added more tests and improved the activation process so that inactive visitors can be reminded of the activation requirement even if they log in and out.
You will need to migrate to get the authlogic changes but after that it should handle password upgrades transparently.
Should be ready for use. Tests are very thorough (a lot of our code relies on this extension) but the latest updates were quite sweeping so issues are possible.
git submodule add git://github.com/spanner/radiant-reader-extension.git vendor/extensions/reader
cd vendor/extensions/reader
git submodule init
git submodule update
cd ../..
rake radiant:extensions:reader:migrate
rake radiant:extensions:reader:update
Sorry: it's a bit of a faff to get the submodules in.
The update task will install a /stylesheets/admin/reader.css that you can leave alone and a /stylesheets/reader.css that you should call from your reader layout (see below) and then improve upon. There is also a very thin /javascripts/reader.js: all it does is fade notifications.
Under multisite Reader adds a few administrative columns to the site table:
- reader_layout determines the layout used to present reader pages and defaults to 'Main' or the first layout it finds in that site.
mail_from_nameandmail_from_addressdetermine from whom and where the administrative email sent to readers appear to come. They default to the name and email address of the owner of the site.
There are corresponding Radiant::Config entries for single-site installations:
site.title
site.url
site.default_mail_from_name
site.default_mail_from_address
These are mostly used in email, but they are required.
We use the share_layouts extension to wrap the layout of your public site around the pages produced by the reader extension. The details of the layout are up to you: as long as it calls <r:content /> at some point, it'll work. Ideally it will call <r:content part="title" /> too. There is also a breadcrumbs part if that's required. In many cases you can just use your existing site layout and the various forms and pages will drop into its usual compartments.
...is the idea. The reader admin pages are properly registered with the AdminUI as collections of parts, so you can override them in the same way as the other admin pages.
Marking a reader as untrusted does nothing much here apart from making them go red, but we assume that in other extensions that will have some limiting effect.
In lighthouse, please, or for little things an email or github message is fine.
Copyright spanner ltd 2007-9. Released under the same terms as Rails and/or Radiant. Contact will at spanner.org