Hi Roberto
This was one of the first things we realised when we started looking at dotLRN - our solution (which is not ideal, but works part way) was to develop an auto-registration + membership facility, which can be linked to email patterns.
Basically it works like this - I added 3 parameters for the Main Site:
- AutoAddTodotLRN [0 or 1] (Automatically add users to a default dotLRN community?)
- AutoAddUseEmailPattern [0 or 1] (If AutoAddTodotLRN, then only emails matching dotLRN email pattern are AutoAdded)
- AutoAdddotLRNCommunityID [int] (If AutoAddTodotLRN, the ID of the dotLRN community that people who register will automatically join)
and hooked into the email patterns stuff already in dotLRN. I also amended the registration pages a bit, to do the checking and dotLRN membership bit.
I then created a community called the Open Community, and used it's community_id to set AutoAdddotLRNCommunityID.
So once I turned AutoAddTodotLRN on, I could have everyone who registered with the site automatically added to the Open Community, and I could restrict this by using email patterns if I didn't want everyone who registered to join automatically.
As I mentioned, it's not the same as having a public area (as it requires the user to register), but it's someway there.
Another possible solution, that ocurred to me as I write this, is to create a community (like my Open Community) to act as the public area, create a user (say, Guest, or Anonymous) who is a limited guest user (although if they are guest, they can't see forums, so you might want to hack that!) and hack the login to default to that user if no login data is entered. Again, not ideal, but a bit closer to the ideal maybe??
Just my quasi-random thoughts on the problem :)
<Raad>
