How To Set a Top Level Page for User

Note: This is quick and dirty and does not really restrict a user from editing other pages, it just restricts which pages they see when logged into the admin tool. A user could still edit a page by changing the id number of the URL. An example of this would be admin/pages/edit/1 would still edit the home page (assuming it is ID 1), even though it is not viewable on their admin tool.

What this hack does:

 +--+ Home Page <- Admin starts here when logged in
    |
    +--- About
    |
    +--+ Articles Dogs <- New user 'dog_editor' starts here when logged in
       |
       +--- Greyhound
       |
       +--- Poodle

Can also be used for multiple sites:

 +--+ Home Page <- Admin starts here when logged in
    |
    +---+ www.doggone.com <- New user 'dog_admin' starts here when logged in
    |   |    
    |   +--- About
    |   |
    |   +--- Articles
    |  
    +---+ www.catlovers.com  <- New user 'cat_admin' starts here when logged in
        |    
        +--- About
        |
        +--- Articles

Step by Step Guide

Step 1.

Add in a database field of type integer to the user table called ‘page_id’. This can be done with migrations of a database editor like CocoaMysql

Using migrations, create a new file: 010_add_page_id_field_to_user.rb

 class AddPageIdFieldToUser < ActiveRecord::Migration
   def self.up
     add_column "users", "page_id", :integer
   end

   def self.down
     remove_column "users", "page_id" 
   end
 end

Then run ‘rake migrate’ at the command line.

Step 2.

Add in a new select box to the user admin tool to select the top page (optional) to restrict the page view in app/views/admin/user/edit.rhtml.

After this code for the user role selection:

 <tr>
     <td class="label"><label for="user_admin">Roles</label></td>
     <td class="field">
         <span class="checkbox"><%= check_box "user", "admin" %>&nbsp;Administrator</span>
         <span class="checkbox"><%= check_box "user", "developer" %>&nbsp;Developer</span>
     </td>
     <td class="help">Roles restrict user privileges and turn parts of the administrative interface on or off.</td>
 </tr>

Insert a new select box for what top-level page to restrict to:

 <tr>
     <td class="label"><label for="user_top_level_page">Top Level Page</label></td>
     <td class="field">
      <%= select "user", "page_id", Page.find(:all, :conditions=>['parent_id = 1 and status_id=100']).collect { |s| [ s.title, s.id ] }, 
     :include_blank=>true } %>
     </td>
     <td class="help">Optional. Top level starting page for this user.</td>
 </tr>

Note: this assumes the home page is page_id 1. If you take out the :conditions specification, then any page on the site will show (and work in the page admin tool). this way you could set the top-level page for a user further down into the site. I added the conditions for parent_id = 1 (first-level page like about, or articles) and status_id = 100 is published. You can also restrict to certain layouts this way, etc.

Step 3.

Edit the admin page controller to start at the page specified in the users page_id setting if it exists in app/views/admin/page_controller.rb:

 def index
   #### new code ###########
   user = User.find(session[:user].id)
   if user.page_id
     @homepage = Page.find(user.page_id)
   else
     @homepage = Page.find_by_parent_id(nil)    
   end
   #### end new code #########

   ### WAS
   # @homepage =Page.find_by_parent_id(nil)
 end

That should do it. It is QND (quick and dirty), but it just might be enough for your purposes.

Optionally, I locked out access to edit snippets in app/views/admin/snippet_controller.rb:

 require_dependency 'admin/model_controller'
 require_dependency 'response_cache'

 class Admin::SnippetController < Admin::AbstractModelController
   model :snippet

   only_allow_access_to :new, :edit, :remove,
     :when => [ :admin],
     :denied_url => { :controller => 'snippet', :action => 'index' },
     :denied_message => 'You must have developer privileges to perform this action.'

 end