Partially dynamic menus as a site-wide template

As part of a subscription service, several different classes of visitors need navigation to various groups of pages with exclusion of blocked access rights. There are about 5 classes of visitors, each having a static set of appropriate links. We are using PHP/MySQL server technologies.

Can varied menus be substituted based upon a session variable, such as $_SESSION['UserGroup'], and applied to many pages in a shared manner? Actions (such as logging in) during sessions can change the 'UserGroup' value. A default of "Unknown" for a session UserGroup is set, and changes are applied through an authentication process.

I'm having a little difficulty understanding your current scenario. When it comes to setting a session variable based on a value in a record for a user this is a feature of Security Assist. In the authenticate user server behavior on the last step you can configure session variables based on the values for that users record. So if you store the UserGroup value in the user's record then you can have this value stored in a session variable on login. You get to name this session variable yourself so you can use the one from your example.

You could then conditionally show, or hide areas of the navigation or have entirely different navigation depending on the value of this session variable.

Originally Said By: Eric Mittman

  I'm having a little difficulty understanding your current scenario. When it comes to setting a session variable based on a value in a record for a user this is a feature of Security Assist. In the authenticate user server behavior on the last step you can configure session variables based on the values for that users record. So if you store the UserGroup value in the user's record then you can have this value stored in a session variable on login. You get to name this session variable yourself so you can use the one from your example.

You could then conditionally show, or hide areas of the navigation or have entirely different navigation depending on the value of this session variable.  

The session variable is done. I'm having trouble getting entirely different navigation to show based on the value. How can this be done (in PHP) as part of a template, so that it can be applied to many pages across a website. I tried a couple of options, but they seem to show as body text rather than as menus. I know that I'm likely to just be missing some basic setting or command in the code.

There are probably a few ways you can get this done but one of the easiest may be to have different menus that you conditionally use depending on the user level.

You could implement something like this by first creating the menus in Menu Writer. You would craft each unique menu here.

Then on your template page where you would have a reference to the menu file you can add in references to the other menus. When they are all on the page you can add in some if statements or a switch statement so that only one of them is used.

Every time you create another menu in the site there will be a new menu in the menu writer folder. They will be prefixed with 0, then 1 and so on. If you craft this correctly you could just use a single reference for the menu file and concatenate the user group session variable that holds one of the corresponding values for the menu you would like to display. This part is a little advanced but would give you the same result.

If you have any problems with any part of this let me know and I can give you some pointers.