Confused by permission settings

I have 2 categories for documents. Category 1 is for downloading documents by the general public. Category 2, which has 2 sub-categories, is for uploading and downloading of documents by a specific member group ("Teachers"). Under Rules>>Public, Download is set to "Denied". Under Rules>>Teachers, Download is set to "Allowed". However, this results in a conflict, and the calculated setting is "Not Allowed (Locked)". When I change Rules>>Public>>Download to "Inherited", this clears the conflict on Category 2. However, does this now mean that the public visitors to the website have the ability to download documents from Category 2, which are intended only for the "Teachers" group?

Hi Michael

In this case, you can simpky set Public>>Download to "Inherited" and It will work as expected . Public users won't be able to download document in in Category 2 (and it's sub-categories) .

Regards,

Tuan

Thanks. I will try that.

I just tested it with a user who does not have permissions to download documents in a particular category. Even though the user cannot download any document in that category in accordance with the permissions, he can still see the category and the documents it contains. Can the user be prevented from accessing the category? Even better, can a category be hidden from a user who does not have download permissions?

Dear Michael

For accessing, you will have to use "Access permission", not "Download" permission. In your case, please use the following steps :

1. Go to Users -> Access Levels, add a new access level called Teachers and choose Teachers group for that access level.

2. Edit the categoroies and documents you want to visiable only to Teachers group, set Access attribute of these categories (and documents) to Teachers . After that, only users from Teachers group can see these categories and documents.

Hope the explanation is clear to you. Joomla 2.5 ACL is powerful, flexible but It also alitle difficult to understand .

Tuan

Thank you! Problem solved.

Great !

I am having the same issue:
Public-->inherited (which give it a calculated setting of not allowed) therefor no one can download
Software Download -->Allowed (but since public is not allowed it cause a conflict and does not let my group download)
I have several levels of sub categories

-product category
-product subcategory
-product
-product manuals (this is the category I am setting the group "Software Download" allowed permission

how can I make this work?

Hi Missy

Could you please send me administrator account of your site so that I can have a quick look at your settings to see what's wrong here ?

Tuan

No I can't as it is a local site for now.