Recent Topics Block - Making it more permissions sensitive

DaRube · New Member Joined: Apr 26, 2005 Posts: 1

I recently displayed the Forum Topics Block on my site, but noticed that it displayed the 10 most recent topics without sensitivity to the permissions configured for the forums.

In my case, none of my forums are available to users who are not locked in, and several of them are hidden from users who don't belong to specific groups.

I would like to modify this block to filter topics according to the same permissions in effect for the forums.

I've looked at the ForumsCollapsing block available for download here, and I am hoping to go beyond that also, at least as far as the filtering is concerned.

In my first attempt to do this, I tried to leverage some of the existing code, such as the auth.php file, but I found that it had tons of dependencies to other files, variables, etc, and that approach became unwieldy.

Perhaps someone could explain for me how certain concepts are represented in the tables, and then I could do the programming:

1) What permissions does phpBB/phpNuke check to determine whether to display a forum to a user? In what order does it check them?

2) How do I determine which forums are visible to users who are logged in but not members of groups?

I'm sure I'll have more questions as I get into it.

If anyone is knowledgeable of the phpBB workings and would be willing to advise me more closely on this, send me a private message with an Instant Messenger ID and I'd be delighted to share the process.