ACL system with multiple ACL tags for UNA

Yes exactly users to have simultaneous multiple ACL levels Leonid.

And also for the content to be visible for multiple ACL levels+profiles etc again.

Hi dear @Cem

What you pointed out in your post drew my attention. I would like to give my thought about your UNA use case. IMHO, it seems that there is a misuse of the Access Control Lists (ACL) feature in your system and your UNA website is not being used correctly. Please don’t get me wrong. I beg your pardon for that and please correct me if I am wrong.

ACL Levels are NOT categories. To organize your members or your website’s content into categories, you should’ve used features like groups, spaces, labels, badges etc. instead.

‘Cardiologists’, ‘Pediatricians’, ‘Orthopedists’ etc. cannot be considered system membership levels. When you charge, let’s say, 10.00 Euros for a membership, your users don’t pay that amount to become Cardiologists or Pediatricians. They do pay for it to be granted a status (level) on your website that will give them the access (permission) to some special features (e.g. create and read a blog posts, view and comment videos etc.) available for that specific membership (e.g. Premium). One can be a Cardiologist but he/she is a Premium member on your website. Another one can be a Gynecologist but he/she is a Premium Plus or Gold or Business member and so forth. 

But one CANNOT be Cardiologist and be, at the same time, a Standard, Premium, Premium Plus, Gold and Business member. That’s exactly what you are trying to request by asking for a setup where a user can be in the ACLs doctors + cardiologists + pediatric cardiologist. It just won’t work. It’s one or the other.

As already mentioned, features like groups, spaces, labels, badges etc. are the ones intended to organize/categorize members and website content.

You can create groups (public or closed, or even paid ones) and call them e.g.: Cardiologists, Pediatricians, Gynecologists etc.

Members who have access (permission) to groups, because their ACL is, let’s say: Premium, can belong (participate) to one or all of these groups and received exclusive content targeted to groups they belong to. Also, while creating any content in UNA, you will be offered the option to select where (who) that content should be posted to (even to groups).

The same organization concept applies to Labels. They are channels, tags. Anyone who subscribe to a Label will receive any content tagged with that label. You can have as many Labels as you want in your system and your members can subscribe to as many labels as they want too. e.g: Cardiac Electrophysiology, Cardiac Imaging, Pediatric Cardiology, Cardio-Oncology etc.

Hope it makes sense. Once again, I might be wrong about your UNA configuration and I apologize for that. Please, feel free to correct me.

Thanks.

Hello @OneEagle ,

Yes I get your points and thanks for supporting this discussion.

Our site is a complex structure let me respond to your comments below and may be my idea will be better presented.

In current status of UNA I understand that "membership" need to be unique for each member.

But I dont see the memberships as "levels", they could be just ACL tools that can be used in a flexible way, to break the barrier in our mind, we can name them in a different way like ACL tags etc. If there are multiple definitions of the ACL rules for a unique user their merged result will be effective on users actions.

That said for instance a cardiologist could be a member of standart users and be a member of cardilogists and doctors from X city in such advanced structure.

Or for the content, we may be able to show the same content to multiple selected levels. A post can be visible to cardiologists and standart users at the same time, which is not available as of v12.1.

"The same organization concept applies to Labels. They are channels, tags. Anyone who subscribe to a Label will receive any content tagged with that label. You can have as many Labels as you want in your system and your members can subscribe to as many labels as they want too. e.g: Cardiac Electrophysiology, Cardiac Imaging, Pediatric Cardiology, Cardio-Oncology etc."

These labels you describe seems like providing very good functionality I didnt notice them, may be we dont have them in v12.1?

Or channels of 12.1 is just the same thing? In the way you explain they will provide perfect functionality and I will check for more integration to our content.

Currently we were using them just as #COVID19 and never look back , cause I was not aware of the subscription functionality.

But if they work in a healthy way yes we need to think about integrating them more to our content.

Your clear explanation made me more aware about channels thank you.

Hi Cem! Thanks a lot for your reply. Now I understand what you mean!

You mean the ability to publish content accross multiple Membership Levels (ALCs) - In your case, ACLs doctors + cardiologists + pediatric cardiologs, right? if so, then the 'Visibility' feature might be the best approach. (It's just a suggestion, though)

The same way in Studio, we use 'Visibility' for pages, blocks (e.g. visible to: Administrator, Moderator, Standard, Premium etc.), maybe we could use it on the content creation page to select the Visibility to specific membeship levels (ACLs) as well. Currently, you can set the visibility of a content (post, article, picture, video etc) to: Public, Friends, Relationships, Courses, Groups etc. only.

Why do I suggest the 'Visibility' feature? It's because achieving what you are suggesting, meaning placing the same members in multiple Membership Levels (ACLs), multiple Subscriptions at the same time (e.g. the same member is, at the same time, Moderator, Administrator, Standard, Premium or In your case, Cardiologist, Pediatric Cardiologist etc.) might be extremily difficult, I have never ever seen such a configuration before on the internet when it comes to subscription/membership-based websites whether they are free or paid. A member can only have ONE (1) active subscription at a time.

You CANNOT have a member in a plan called 'Cardiologist' and have him/her in another Plan called 'Pediatric Cardiologist' at the same time. Even Payment Gateways (Stripe, PayPal etc) will not be able to process two subscription/plan payments of the same user at the same time. One of the user's plan will be cancelled.

Things get very tricky because you are using Membership Levels (ACLs) as Categories to organize members and content on your system. That's add an extra layer of complexity to your website. Anyway, if such a setting works well for you and you are fine about it, then no problem. UNA is flexible enough and can actually be adapted to any use case.

Regarding Labels, this video by Andrey will help you to understand better the concept behind 'Hashtags, Labels, Channels' and how they work:

https://unacms.com/p/hashtags-labels-channels

Also, you should consider upgrading your system as many new functionalities were introduced since UNA 12. And many bugs were fixed as well.

Thanks

Hi OneEagle,

thanks for your explanations,

Yes multi level visiblity is one of the ways to achieve the functionality I mentioned, at least partly.

Thanks for the link of the video I will check it.

I will do the upgrade in a low traffic time period cause we have a lot of customizations that needs to be reimplemented to the latest version :)

You are welcome.