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ocPortal Tutorial: Advanced ocPortal member system

Written by Chris Graham, ocProducts
This tutorial will cover some of the more advanced features of the OCF member system.


Table of contents

  1. ocPortal Tutorial: Advanced ocPortal member system
    1. Merging members
    2. Custom profile fields
      1. Display rules
      2. Encrypted CPFs
      3. Categorisation of CPFs
    3. Welcome E-mails
    4. CSV files
    5. Implicit usergroups and external usergroup listings
    6. See also

Merging members

Thumbnail: Merging members

Merging members
The ability to merge members is only of occasional use, but when you find you do need it, it can be a great help. The usual situation is that one member gets 'bored', feels 'victimised', or wants to go 'undercover' (often, talking with their other account to 'hide the fact'), and creates themselves a second username. This may be a violation of your rules, depending which you have chosen, but is often annoying; it can usually easily be noticed just by seeing that two members have the same personality, spelling and language habits, usage patterns and IP address.

It is worth noting, that you should not be overly suspicious, as members who share some of the listed characteristics, may simply be family members in a household that shares an Internet connection.

The merge member feature will attempt to reassign everything attached (in any way) to the 'from' member to the 'to' member.
It is possible that some reassignments will not be possible, in which case, records may be dropped; for example, if both members share a secondary usergroup, ocPortal would fail [due to database key constraints] to assign both membership records to the same user, and hence drop one of them. You do not need to worry as this is handled automatically.

Custom profile fields


Thumbnail: Adding a custom profile field

Adding a custom profile field
The 'Custom Profile Fields' allow you to create new data fields to attach to member profiles. By default, an 'About me' field is included, and a number of hidden/locked/non-editable fields that store details relating to point counts, and staff-membership and role.

Add Custom Profile Fields from the Setup section of the Admin Zone, under the Custom Profile Fields icon.

Lists

For a list-type CPF, define the list by placing a '|' separated list in the default value field (e.g. "This|That|Other"). The first value in the list will be the default.

Thumbnail: Custom profile fields are edited by editing member profiles

Custom profile fields are edited by editing member profiles
There are a number of custom profile field options that you may set that allow CPFs to function for a number of different purposes, including:
  • Storing hidden details on member (for example, a list of rule infractions, such as to aid decisions on cumulative punishment)
  • Allowing members to specify details about themselves (for example, their occupation)
  • Forcing members to specify certain additional details (for example, on a forum for staff of a company, you could make members enter their job role, so as to reduce the chance of a non employee from joining and remaining an active member)
  • Allowing members of a certain sub-communities (via their usergroup) to specify details appropriate to that sub-community (for example, those in the 'Football' usergroup of a school discussion forum could specify the position they play, whilst those in the 'Music' usergroup could specify the instrument they play).

There is a 'Privacy' module in the account that allows members to limit access beyond this. If there are more than 15 CPFs it will only give them options for the CPFs they have filled in.


Thumbnail: Custom profile fields are optionally shown where members post

Custom profile fields are optionally shown where members post
A 'locked' custom profile field can not be edited or deleted.

Thumbnail: Custom profile fields are all shown in member profiles (those that the viewer has permission to view)

Custom profile fields are all shown in member profiles (those that the viewer has permission to view)
It is possible to configure where a value for a custom profile field for members will be displayed. The field will always be visible from their profile page, but also:
  • if 'show in posts' is selected, it will also be visible on their forum posts, and their member galleries and member gallery images/videos
  • if 'show in post previews' is selected, it will also be visible when displaying a member sub-gallery in a list of sub-galleries

If you have more than 60 textual CPFs (except Comcode ones), any ones created after the 60th will not be included for searching on the search module's member search form.



Display rules

CPFs are pulled up according to the following set of rules:

PROFILE FIELD SETTINGS SHOWS IN FOLLOWING CIRCUMSTANCES
Owner viewableOwner settablePublicly viewableRequiredJoinAdmin add memberEdit own profileEdit others profileEdit others profile but has 'View any field' permissionView own profileView others profileView own or others profile but has 'View any field' permissionMember searchable

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In addition, members may override display settings in their Account, on a per-field basis. They may choose to display fields:
  • Not at all
  • To members
  • To friends
  • To certain usergroups
  • To everyone

Encrypted CPFs

When creating a custom profile field, it is possible to mark it as encrypted. If you have the OpenSSL PHP extension installed and configured (see the Web Hosting for ocPortal tutorial), ocPortal can automatically encrypt the contents of such CPFs, such that their sensitive data would not be revealed if the server were to be compromised.
For welcome e-mails to work the ocPortal cron bridge must be configured as discussed in the Configuration tutorial

To mark a CPF as encrypted, tick the "Encryption" box when creating the field, making sure to first have encryption set up on your server and on ocPortal.

When editing the value of an encrypted CPF, the encrypted data will be shown. To change the value, simply overwrite it with the data you want to change it to. Leaving the value alone will not cause it to be doubly-encrypted.

When viewing an encrypted CPF on a member's profile page, the encrypted data will not be decrypted or shown. To decrypt and view the data, click the "Decrypt" JavaScript link for the CPF. A popup will allow the decryption passphrase to be entered and the data decrypted. The decryption passphrase is the passphrase used to unlock the private key, as specified when originally generating the public/private key pair. Typically only staff will have knowledge of the passphrase, since there's only one for the entire site.

Categorisation of CPFs

If you prefix CPF names like "Example: Field A" and "Example: Field B", ocPortal will be smart enough to treat this as a categorisation and render the join/edit-profile forms in a more appropriate way.

Welcome E-mails


Thumbnail: Creating a welcome e-mail

Creating a welcome e-mail
ocPortal provides special support for composing a series of welcome e-mails that are sent out to new members on a predefined schedule.
The purpose of this feature is to gradually advertise the features of your website to your members in a way that reinforces awareness. As most members will not usually return to a website, welcome e-mails provide a strong tool to keep them aware and entice them to fully embrace whatever service you are providing.


CSV files

You can use CSV files to put member data into your website, or to export it. This functionality is available from the 'Tools' section of the Admin Zone. There is full support for auto-creation of usergroups and custom profile fields as required to get the data imported.

Implicit usergroups and external usergroup listings

ocPortal has support for 'implicit usergroups' which are usergroup memberships defined by custom code written by programmers. It is useful for using permissions for handling special circumstances. For example, a programmer could create an implicit usergroup for under 18's and remove the bypass-wordfilter permission for that usergroup.

In addition ocPortal can take usergroup memberships from LDAP.

Usually when ocPortal handles checks of when someone is in a usergroup it goes through some fool-proof methods to do it. However for performance sometimes it needs to get a full list of everyone in a usergroup without having to run a lot of calculations. In these situations only natural ocPortal usergroups are checked.
This said, ocPortal automatically syncs LDAP groups and ocPortal has a CRON hook (scheduler task) that is disabled by default that can be turned on by an OcCLE command to synchronise implicit usergroups as normal usergroup memberships:

Code

:set_value('implicit_usergroup_sync','1');
If this is set then anyone put into the usergroup manually that does not match the implicit usergroup check would end up being removed again.

If synching is not enabled, or group memberships come from LDAP, then the following things will not work as expected when it comes to them:
  • member search by usergroup
  • birthdays RSS feed filtering by usergroup
  • sending a newsletter to a usergroup
  • implicit memberships are not shown in exported CSV files
  • copying members from one usergroup to another
  • various areas of code that list all staff or super-members
  • signing up everyone in a usergroup for calendar event reminders
  • showing how many members there are in a usergroup
  • listing usergroup memberships when viewing a usergroup


See also

Is this tutorial insufficient?

If you think this tutorial needs work (maybe we didn't explain things well enough?) please let us know.