Joomla 2.5 - add automatic system message when user is logged in - authentication

Joomla 2.5 does already generate a "you are logged in now" message, but only one time after a user just registered (if "auto-login" is enabled).
However I would like to display a similar (not exact same) message each time when the user loggs in (as a "greeting").
Any rough pointer of directions from anyone (e.g. where in the Joomla code to look how it's done in the "auto-login after registration" case) ?
THANKS guys (n' girls ;)

The proper way would be to write a plugin which hooks into "onUserLogin" to raise the warning.
More informations about plugin development can be found on JDocs http://docs.joomla.org/Plugin.

Related

Cannot send message successfully as a GUEST in Facebook customer chat plugin

After implement FB customer chat plugin using Gatsby, it can be shown on my website. However, the conversation for GUEST, indicate that "The message cannot be sent" for some reason, please have a look on the capture.
P/s: I can send message normally with logged in account conversation
Anyone know what is going wrong ? How can fix that ? Please advise me
Also make sure that Page settings > General > Messages is set to "People can contact my page privately"
Found the cause, this is not about technical things, but relating to Page restriction that being attach to the plugin
Anyone got this issue, should go to Page settings > General > Make sure Country and Age is for Everyone

Accessing Metacritic API and/or Scraping

Does anybody know where documentation for the Metacritic api is/if it still works. There used to be a Metacritic API at https://market.mashape.com/byroredux/metacritic-v2#get-user-details which disappeared today.
Otherwise I'm trying to scrape the site myself but keeping getting a blocked by a 429 Slow down. I got data like 3 times this hour and haven't been able to get anymore in the last 20 minutes which is making testing difficult and application possibly useless. Please let me know if there's anything else I can be doing to scape I don't know about.
I was using that API as well for an app I wrote a while ago. Looks like the creator removed it from Mashape. I just sent him an email to ask whether it'll be back up. I did find this scraper online. It only has a few endpoints but following the examples given you could easily add more. Let me know if you make any progress!
Edit: Looks like CBS requested it to be taken down. The ToS prohibits scraping:
[…] you agree not to do the following, or assist others to do the following:
Engage in unauthorized spidering, “scraping,” data mining or harvesting of Content, or use any other unauthorized automated means to gather data from or about the Services;
Though I was hoping for a Javascript way of doing this, the creator of the API also told me some info.
He says I was getting blocked for not having a User agent in the header and should use a 429 handling procedure i.e. re-request with longer pauses in between.
A PHP plugin available as well: http://datalinx.io/shop/metacritic-api/
I had to add a user agent like JCDJulian said and now it allows me to scrape. So for Ruby:
agent = Mechanize.new
agent.user_agent_alias = "Mac Firefox"
Then it stopped giving me the 403 Forbidden error.

How to propagate data from mod-auth-external authenticator to served page

Background
In our Apache configuration we use mod-auth-external (previously on Google Code) to invoke PAM authentication.
Now there is a request for proper handling of shadow-based password expiration:
If password is before warning period Apache should respond with HTTP status code 200. Nothing new here.
If password is in warning period (its validity end is near) Apache should respond with HTTP status code 200, but include somehow information about the warning period.
If password is in expiration period (it is no longer valid but user can still change it on his own) Apache should respond with HTTP status code 401 and include somehow information about expiration period.
If password is beyond expiration period (it is no longer valid and account was locked, administrator must unlock it) Apache should respond with HTTP status code 401 and include somehow information about the locked state.
(There are also corner cases of page missing or some other errors. It is not clear what to do then. But it seems that solving above points would allow to solve those corner cases as well.)
Our PAM authenticator (used through mod-auth-external) is able to differentiate those cases by adjusting return values. That we already have.
The problem is however how to get information from the authenticator to the associated action serving the page (either actual page with 200 status code or 401 error document).
Current investigations
It should be noted that there is significant difference between requirement 2 and requirements 3 and 4.
Requirements 3 and 4 alone are somewhat easier because they both involve our mod-auth-external authenticator returning error (access denied). So we only need to know how to get that error code in 401 error page. I even raised issue on that on mod-auth-external page.
Requirement 2 is much more difficult. In that case our authenticator must return 0 (access granted) and still somehow propagate information about the warning to whatever gets served in the end.
Logs parsing
Obvious (and ugly) idea is to parse logs. mod-auth-external description on Google Code Wiki mentions that authenticator return value gets written to Apache syslog. Also whatever authenticator prints to standard error stream gets logged as well.
This could be used to pass information from authenticator to some other entities.
The difficulty here is that it is not clear how to do it safely. What to print to be sure that "the other entity" will match properly current request with log entry. Mere URL doesn't seem to be enough since there can be multiple requests for the same URL at the same time. While I don't see anything more useful in what authenticator gets.
Another issue here is that it seems that to be able to parse the logs you have to have some non-trivial code running for "the other entity". And this complicates things further since how should we do it?
Another idea
If we could make the authenticator somehow modify "request session" (or whatever, maybe just environment? - I don't know, I'm new to Apache) to add arbitrary data to it we would be (almost) at home.
Our authenticator would somehow store "password status" and also possibly days remaining to the end of warning/expiration period (if applicable). Then upon serving 401 error page we would retrieve that back and use it to dynamically generate content of the page.
Or even better we would have it stored in session so that the other end could read that data directly. (For cases where it is not simply a browser showing page.)
But so far I fail to see how to do that.
Do you have any idea how to meet those requirements?
For over a month I got no answer here. Nor on GitHub issue that I opened for mod-auth-external.
So I ended doing a custom modification to our mod-auth-external. I don't like modifying third party software but this one seems dead anyway. And also it turned out we are using pretty old version (2.2.9 which I upgraded to 2.2.11, the last in 2.2.x line). Which already had some customizations anyway.
I explained details of the solution in a comment to my GitHub issue so I will not repeat them here.
I will however comment on shadow details as they were not mentioned there.
I had two choices: either use getspnam function to retrieve shadow data or to parse messages generated by PAM. First attempts based on getspnam function but in the end I used PAM messages. I didn't have strong reasons for any of those. However I decided to propagate in HTTP response not only shadow status but any PAM message that was generated and so it seemed easier to follow that way.

Web Dynpro for ABAP Explanation Text (Green Underline) not working for certain users

I have recently added Explanation text to certain fields on the SRM Contract screen (both standard and cusom fields). The user that I unit tested with worked fine, however most other users do not work. After investigation I've found that it is not just the Explanation Text that I've added, but all Explanation Text that is missing.
According to the sap help entry the behaviour is similar to what I would expect for Help mode = off.
Is it possible to turn Help mode on or off on a per user (or role) basis, and where should I look to find this?
you already found it: SAP Help says:
"You can activate the help mode either in the personal settings in the portal or in the associated URL Parameter" ... means in personal Settings, but I feel that you want it globally not on personal base or in the associated URL Parameter. The latter means you'll have to find the application in the Portal Content, there you can find URL Parameter and i would try adding HELPMODE=ON... does this help you?
start by rightclicking you application "Technical Help" or "..Help" and see what application you are looking for. Then Google the application and add +"Portal Content", I think then you'll find it.
regards, zy

May we use Yii flash messages on this scenario?

I haven't seen this scenario covered here:
Yii Framework: How to work with Flash Messages.
So, after user registration, I wish to redirect the user to a thank you page where he/she could read more about what he/she should do, and what would happen next. It's a nice amount of information, so adding that message to an already existing page is not an option, because it would get to noisy. Making temporary displaying msg isn't an option neither, because it's a fair amount of text to be read.
On cases like this:
Should we still use flash messages and use a conditional so that what normally exists on the page stays hidden while display a success flash message ?
OR
Should we simply redirect to a given thank you view (by creating the respective thankyou action?)
Is there a better option?
You could use a flash message. But these are really for things like "Your account is now created".
If you want to include a good amount of information, I think it best to have a separate thankyou action/view that people are redirected to after the sign up process is complete.