I recently posted two articles about cloning joomla sites for development and transferring the changes back to the live site. Those posts apply for large changes to existing sections on your Joomla website, but for smaller changes and added functionality you can operate extemely efficiently through what I call "Clever ACL Management". This will speed up development while still providing minimal disturbance to your users on your live site.
What is Clever ACL Management?
This means that you keep the new functionality hidden from the users on your live site as you work on changes. You will be able to do all of your work under the radar and then quickly publish the new sections.
Primary ACL Management through Menu Items
In Joomla, you publish new sections to your site primarily by creating menu items that link to the section or component. Without these menu items, you users will have no way to get to those sections. Joomla menu items can be published to a certain minumum ACL. That is, if you set a menu item to "public" everybody will be able to see the menu item. If you set it to "registered", only logged-in users will be able to see the menu item. If you set it to "special" only users with an ACL at or above "author" will be able to see the menu item.
So all you have to do to keep sections invisible to your users is simply set the access for each new menu item to "special". This way, only authors and admins will be able to see the menu items and access the new sections. When you are ready to launch the new features, just set the access down to public or registered, whichever applies.
Secondary ACL Management through Modules
Joomla modules also have the same ACL settings as menu items, where you can set their access to public, registered, or special. If you are creating a new menu for your new section (say on a sidebar position), you can simply set that menu's module to "special" access. This will let you leave the menu items themselves set to public access if you need to test if from a public perspective. To access the new sections from a public user's view, just log in as an admin, copy the urls from the menu module, and paste them into a text file. Log out and paste the urls into your address bar to see and interact with the sections as a public user might.
You can also use module ACL to control any other modules for the new section. This applies if you have modules for that new section that will appear on your public homepage. Simply set their access to special and your users won't notice, but you can still see how your pages will look once you publish the new section. Again, once you are ready to launch, just set the access to each module back to public or registered.
Doctor's Orders
Clever management of ACLs can help you prototype and configure new sections and features for your Joomla site and then allow you to rapidly deploy them for public or registered use. Stay tuned for an overview of a tool called "MetaMod" that will allow very specific module control beyond that provided by Joomla's core module system.
Jesse Dundon is a founding partner at Hathway Tech, where he is responsible for project management, training, and overall business strategy. He is a graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, avid rugby player, and a true scholar of Joomla! and web development in general.
