I'm working on setting up a Joomla Site for a member's only community portal. The site will be using the Agora Forum 2.5.5 and users will have the ability to get notifications through RSS feeds. The funny wrinkle here is that with the default configuration is that unless a user is logged into Joomla, the feeds don't work. The reason is a security setting of when to display the link for the Forums (i.e. only Registered Users). I have a couple of options that I see.

  • Hack the Joomla code to allow logins to be passed via the url. Not something I'm really fond of doing.
  • Aggregate the Feeds to another directory that isn't under Joomla control and have users use those feeds.
  • Allow the forums to be public (which really isn't an option but I know somebody was going to suggest it).
The other cramp that is bugging me is that with Agora you have the ability to set groups for a particular forum, and put users in the group. However the feeds seem to only work if the Guest group also has read access. Which makes hidding these forums and still providing newsfeeds difficult. I could aggregate these specific items to a separete url that is refreshed from time to time. For these I might have to do that. Any other thoughts from Joomla and Agora users?