Login Check

[metricgravity]

Hi.

I am the website manager for an OJS journal. I created a new page for the journal.

I want to create a feature which will require users to log in before accessing the page I created. However, I have not been able to do this. I would appreciate advice.

Thank you,
metricgravity

[JasonNugent]

Hi metricgravity,

how did you create the new page? Did you use the static pages plugin, or some other method?

Regards,
Jason

[metricgravity]

I have access to the UNIX account containing the HTML files for the journal server. I went into the account, and created the page in PHP.

Thank you for your help.

Regards,
metricgravity

[metricgravity]

Hi, Jason.

I originally created the page with PHP, without the static pages plugin. After reading your message, I discovered the static pages plugin. I successfully installed it and created a practice page. However, I was not able to require a login for that page or my original one.

Thank you for your help.

Best Regards,
metricgravity

[JasonNugent]

Hey metricgravity,

Yeah, I had asked about the static plugin because the pages that it creates are served up via database calls and don't require authentication. If you're creating your own content and you want access control you will probably need to extend the 'pages' handler of the section you're building on. There are a few steps for this. You'd have to add the method call to the appropriate index.php file, the necessary method to the Handler, and probably create some templates for the content. It wouldn't be a standalone page in the sense that you'd write custom PHP and just drop it into a directory within OJS. The Handler function can perform validation functions or else you can use some of the variables provided by our TemplateManager classes and so some testing in the templates via Smarty template blocks.

Regards,
Jason

[metricgravity]

Hi, Jason.

I was wondering if you could please give me more details on how I would set up the login check.

I created a form for an author to e-mail an editorial request to an editor. The problem is that anyone can use the form, and I only want people who are logged in to have access.

I know there are pre-prepared e-mail forms. However, I could not get these set up, so that an author could click on an editor's name, and send a message with the required information. I decided to make my own e-mail form from scratch, but I do not want it available to everyone.

Thank you for your help.

Best Regards,
metricgravity

[JasonNugent]

Hi metricgravity,

Your best bet would be to look at some of the code in OJS. Specifically, I can recommend the pages/UserHandler.inc.php file, which serves up all pages related to user home pages. One of the methods in that class, index(), is responsible for serving the base user home page. You can see that one of the first things it does is call $this->validate() which uses our Validation class to determine if a person is logged in or not. If they are not logged in, they get redirected to the login page. I think this is what you want to do. You'd need to incorporate your form page into an existing handler and validate() it prior to serving the form's content. New path operations get defined in the index.php file located in each sub directory of the pages/ folder and map directly to functions in Handler classes.

Regards,
Jason