I have a brand new Joomla 2.5.4 site. A nice developer built the framework for me but it's now my job to finish and customize it. He works full time and can't answer questions for me quickly so I joined your support forum for help.

My first problem is that I need several categories of registered users. He set those up for me and set up a registration and login menu.

I want to change what a registered user sees after they log in. Right now they just see boring admin stuff. I'd like to customize that and maybe also present them with a new menu to articles etc but can't see how to do that.

Can you help?

Site is www.valuetrain.net

Bill Bentley

Hi and welcome, Bill!

How many groups of users will you have? Do you want everyone to see the same landing page when they log in or do you want certain groups to be redirected their specific pages?

Kind regards,
Nick

I'll have 5-8 groups and they need to have access to different things. What they see when they first log in might be OK to be common, along with a menu that I certain selections only accessible to certain groups.

Hi Bill,

OK, in that case give our ACL control lessons a try within our "Users" section of our Intermediate class:
www.ostraining.com/courses/class/joomla-25/j25-intermediate/

-Understanding Joomla Users
-Joomla Access Control
-Joomla User Groups
-Setting Your Own ACL - Part 1
-Setting Your Own ACL - Part 2
-Adding an Editor to Our Site

You can redirect the users to any page that you'd like by going to your Login menu item within menu manager and configuring the "Login Redirect" option on the right side.

Hope this helps! Let us know if you have any questions after going through the tutorials.

Kind regards,
Nick

Thanks Nick. I watched them all. That will help me set up groups, users and permissions but that's not my first problem. The first problem is that I want to change what a user sees when they log in. Here is a screen shot of what they see when they log in. I want to customize that but I don't know where it is to edit it.

Hi Bill,

You're welcome!

Key question, what do you want them to see?

Once you get that answered, you can redirect them using the method I described in my last post:Nick wrote:
Kind regards,
Nick

OK, great. We are getting there! I had to put the article ID in the login redirect fields to make it work. There seems to be no way to select from a menu but that will work. Now that give me a new problem. The original user profile is never seen and neither is the link to edit it. Any way we can do both? It would be acceptable to give them a link to their profile and profile editing page from the page I redirect them to but I don't know how to do that.

Hi Bill,

Great! We're getting closer.

That's right, you'd have to use the URL and manually add the URL.

Is the page that you redirected your users to an Article? If so, you can use your WYSIWYG editor to create a link to the profile page. One easy way to find the profile page is to remove the redirect and then copy the URL. Then paste that URL into your WYSIWYG editor's Create Link area.

By the way, JCE is a really good, simple to use WYSIWYG editor. Here's our tutorial on it:
www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/jce/

Kind regards,
Nick

Thank Nick, that worked like a champ! But it introduced a new, unanticipated problem. If they DO click on my URL link to review or edit their profile, they can't get back to the new article I had redirected them to unless they are aware enough to use the browser back button enough times. Any way to make that easier?

What are your forum support hours? Is it available 24/7?

I already use JCE. I agree, it's simple and good.

Bill

Hi Bill,

You're welcome, Bill! I'm glad it worked for you! :)

That's what main menu's are for. You can have a menu item back to the "home page for logged in users". Alternatively, if your template allows it, you could insert a module above or below the content for that page to help with navigation.

You can see our support hours and other information on the following page:
www.ostraining.com/support-faq

Kind regards,
Nick