Site files accessible in "Links and resources" sidebar
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mahara |
Fix Released
|
Wishlist
|
Adrian Schlegel |
Bug Description
According to the Site Files documentation, files uploaded into the site files section are meant to be accessible to all logged-in users (via the "Site Files" tab on any file selector). The one exception to this is files in the hard-coded "Public" folder, which are meant to also be accessible to users who aren't logged in.
A user on the #mahara irc channel reported that Site Files sitting in a subdirectory, however, are not accessible to normal users. I verified this behavior in 1.8dev.
To reproduce:
1. Log in as an admin user
2. Go to the Site Files page
3. Create a subdirectory
4. Upload a file into that subdirectory
5. Log in as a non-admin user
6. Add a "files to download" block to a page
7. In the block's file selector, go to the "site files" page
8. You will not see the subdirectory you created in step 4, or be able to access its files.
tags: | added: snack-sized |
Changed in mahara: | |
assignee: | nobody → Adrian Schlegel (adrian-liip) |
status: | Confirmed → Fix Committed |
Changed in mahara: | |
milestone: | none → 1.9.0 |
tags: | added: nominatedfeature |
Changed in mahara: | |
status: | Fix Committed → Fix Released |
An update on this. From comments in the code, and an analysis of how this works, it looks like the original intent on how this was meant to work is as follows:
1. Site Files in the "public" directory can be chosen in the file selector by admins and non-admins (for attaching to Blocks, for instance)
2. Site Files outside the "public" directory cannot.
So it would seem that the proper fix would be:
1. Update the documentation to reflect this
2. Make it so that no files outside of the "public" directory can be chosen in the file selector by non-admins.
However, if we were to implement that change, we would have to watch out for existing sites where non-admin users are relying on files placed in the root level of Site Files. We'd need to move these into the Public directory so they remain accessible, and doing this could cause some disruption (for instance if there's already a file in the Public directory with the same name).
So, it's kind of a major change that would need to be made during a major release. And unfortunately it's too late to include it in 1.8 at this point, so it'll have to wait for 1.9.