[geeklog-devel] Geeklog Demo Mode

[Tom]

If I have time I would like to add some sort of demo mode  to the next
version of Geeklog.

I see a demo mode as a site used for testing and evaluating by the general
public. It will be refreshed every X minutes by some other process by
dropping and importing the database and either deleting and adding the files
again or refreshing just certain directories. The Admin user of a demo site
has its security rights reduced automatically.

Now I don't want this to be a huge endeavor but I would like it to include
as many useful features as possible. Possible features include:

- Configuration. Hide completely and read only modes for Configuration Tabs
and options
- Allow read only modes for things like Plugin Admin, DB Backups, etc... (or
at least disable certain features like plugin uploads, etc..)
- Allow read only of Users and Groups OR somehow lock down or hide the key
users and security features while still letting visitors create test users
and groups
- Develop this in mind so 3rd party plugins like the forum could take
advantage of the demo mode.


1) My first thoughts is that you would enable the DEMO_MODE variable in the
siteconfig.php and then add a bunch of if statements like below anywhere in
the Geeklog core code we want to control what the demo mode has access to.

We could go a bit farther with this idea and add a demo mode array with
different features set to true or false which would allow the admins to
change things as needed. This could get a bit mucky in the configuration
though.

if ( defined('DEMO_MODE') ) {
    redirect_header($_CONF['site_url']."/index.php",10,'Uploads are disabled
in demo mode');
    exit;
}

2) My second idea would be in the install allow for the creation of a
DemoAdmin account (along with updated articles, etc... to reflect demo mode)
with the appropriate security features enabled which would use Geeklog's own
security to control access. The Admin account for the site would still be
the root user and private but the DemoAdmin account would be what is used by
vistors to test things out. Doing this would mean we would need to add more
security features to Geeklog to be able to control certain things like read
only access to the plugin admin. The difficulties here would be the
Configuration. We already have security for access to tabs or not. Allowing
for viewing only for certain tabs and security options would be a lot more
work and make the groups access list grow extremely long.

These are just only ideas and I may not have time to work on it right away
but does anyone have any thoughts on the subject?

Tom

References:
http://wiki.geeklog.net/index.php/Setting_up_a_Demo_Site
http://project.geeklog.net/tracking/view.php?id=1059
http://eight.pairlist.net/pipermail/geeklog-devel/2009-January/004000.html