Hi all. I was looking for a simple, dependable to make certain pages (or a category) available only by a log-in. I found Arvind's MTPrivacy plug-in. It's a couple of years, and the documentation is a little sparse.
My sense is that Arvind is no longer supporting this application, but I've found a bug that is appearing in my installation of MT 4.3 that I was wondering if other users had encountered.
It relates to the Manage Entries screen. The plug-in adds another column - a "lock" to show if Privacy is on or off on that entry. But because it's in a table and the first row only has the extra column, all the rows underneath are out of line with the headings in the first row. See the following images for an example.
Privacy plug-in OFF: http://www.thinkcap.com/images/privacy-off.png
Privacy plug-in ON: http://www.thinkcap.com/images/privacy-on-screen.png
Is anyone using MT Privacy, and if so have you figured out a fix for this? Of course, if anyone knows Arvind, his attention to this would be welcomed.
Thanks.
Reported on Movable Type 4.3
Arvind doesn't support that plugin any longer!
You should be able to hack the plugin to make it compatible with MT v4.x, assuming that the only issue not working is that display...
Thanks. I'll have a look. It appears that the screen works fine in Manage Categories. The little "lock" appears under the right column heading.
He has it up on GitHub. If you want to take a crack at its compatibility, then have at it. Otherwise, I'll probably eventually get around to it.
Given that I'm not a programmer, I'll only be able to find the tables in question in the source and see if I can edit it. Like I said, it's working fine on the Categories listing page.
If you do update the code, I hope that you'll post it on MT's plug-ins page. If you need help with documentation, I'll pitch in.
I wrote some updates to it for 4.1, but it still didn't work quite right then. It's a good plugin, but it needs some serious work.
Yeah, I'm completely stumped on how to fix this. Two hrs now and no luck. All the problem appears to be in CMS.pm
/lib/Privacy/App/CMS.pm
This line is just not showing up:
$new = q{plugins/Privacy/images/privacy-enableddisabled.gif"/>};
Oops. Here's the code:
$new = q{<mt:if name="show_privacy"><td class="si"><img src="<mt:var name="static_uri">plugins/Privacy/images/privacy-<mt:if name="is_private">enabled<mt:else>disabled.gif</mt:if>"/></td></mt:if>};I made some commits yesterday to my GitHub repo. Why don't you download a zip file from GitHub and see what does/doesn't work. I'm testing mine against 4.32, so no guarantees that it'll work with 4.1 or 4.2.
Mike, thanks for stepping in on this. After many hours of looking at this, including time spent with your bug fixes (for verson 4.3) I think I'm going to have to abandon this solution. Here are a few notes for consideration.
1. I'm trying to create a "members only" set of pages using this plug-in. However, if I was to make entries "private" and I all of a sudden decided that I needed to change the password, I'd have to go and edit every single entry and save it. Having a central password control would help.
2. The login screen forces users to choose between OpenID, Typekey, Password, etc. even if you only decide to use one of the choices for security. Makes it confusing for users.
3. Your edit of the mt-privacy.cgi results in going to a page with the ".fcgi" extension after submitting, causing an Error 500.
4. For some reason, once I put Privacy ON and entry I cannot turn it off. Once you save it returns to Privacy On.
5. You must have the php extension ONLY. If you have .html as an extension (or an extension-free URL) the login link shows up twice and messes up the page.
6. As with most MT plug-ins the documentation is pretty scant. I found one link (not on Arvind's site) explaining how to use the privacy tags in your templates.
Thanks again. I hope that something like this evolves to a state where I can easily add secure pages and categories for MT sites.
Keep an eye out for updates on my GitHub repo. I've checked in about 6-8 updates since I last posted here. On my blog, I have it working at 99% its original function, and I run MT 4.32. With regard to point #3, I did some hacking on MT::Auth::OpenID to fix that if you're referring to what I think you're referring. It's not THE BEST solution, but what I did was bundle a second version of MT::Auth::OpenID with Privacy in my GitHub repo that gets loaded over top of MT's built-in copy when mt-privacy.cgi is doing OpenID.
BTW, those are all good points for future work. For the time being, I'm only really concerned with getting Privacy up and running in its most basic form before adding anything else.
Thx, Mike. I'll have a look and get back. I'm only testing against 4.3x as well. Having the ability in Manage Entries to enable/disable privacy, or having a global password change feature would be sweet upgrades to have.
Hi guys. How did you guys get this to work. When I installed the plugin, I can see where I can make an entry private, but when I publish the entry I still see it.
My templates are in HTML and I'm not sure if that's the issue. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
PS. I'm running 4.32
Mike - big thank you for working on this. I downloaded it and was able to get it to work (at least on individual entry pages).
Question for anyone on the thread - can anyone give a brief overview of where the template tags should go? Specifically for an index page? What tags need to be inserted where for the login boxes to appear?
The only other issue I seem to have is I've unchecked vox and lj and yet those log options still show up...?
thanks much!