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textpattern / textpattern

A flexible, elegant, fast and easy-to-use content management system written in PHP.
https://textpattern.com
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Back-office message: an administrator is connected #1583

Closed cara-tm closed 3 years ago

cara-tm commented 3 years ago

Is your feature request related to a problem?

No.

What is the feature?

Could it be useful to display a simple message when an administrator is connected within the back-office to all other users? Sure! In order to inform some important changes currently in process will affect a website.

Bloke commented 3 years ago

I've thought about this before. I think smd_user_manager even has a 'who's online now' (or at least, did. It might not work any more or maybe I took it out).

Anyway, the tough thing with this feature request is that we don't necessarily know when people are visiting the back-end. The login cookie is the problem as it has an expiry of 30 days (I think) so we don't know any further than that granularity. That's the reason we only have the month shown in "last login" on the Users panel.

Can't remember how I got round it in smd_user_manager. I think I had a configurable timeout value in the plugin prefs and then tracked every page refresh so it updated a "last clicked" database table field per user. Then compared those values with the timeout to give an indication of who's around. Not ideal (as it "tracks" people) and not foolproof.

petecooper commented 3 years ago

For me, changes to a site where multiple users are involved (like the scenario @cara-tm outlined in the OP) should be communicated with details, not simply "Alice is connected", and that should happen outside Textpattern, so a) there is notice to anyone who has not logged in, and b) there is an audit trail for who has been informed, when they were informed, and what details they have been given.

petecooper commented 3 years ago

…plus there's also a good chance the administrator is perhaps checking Diagnostics, adding users, or other day-to-day tasks outside the look-and-feel of the site.

petecooper commented 3 years ago

Bumping this for housekeeping - it's plugin territory from my viewpoint, open to input from @Bloke and @bloatware.

Bloke commented 3 years ago

I agree - this is more plugin than core. smd_user_manager shows who's online.