Access Denied, what am I overlooking?

Question

Working with Joomla 3.5.1 and having an issue with pages that I've restricted to a certain permission.

I send out a Newsletter that has roughly 15 stories. The first 5 are always public, but the latter number usually are restricted to "members only". I will have links in my newsletter to the public and private stories. Unfortunately, when someone who isn't logged in clicks on private stories they get an ugly ACCESS DENIED message, instead of "you must be logged in to view this page".

I don't have much experience using Joomla, and am stepping in for an employee that recently left the organization. I realize this could be a learning curve opportunity, so if someone could point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it. I assume I need to designate some sort of error page for this type of event?

Answer 1

According to the Joomla! Documentation:

Joomla! uses the templates/system/error.php file to handle several HTTP Status errors, including "403 Forbidden", "404 Not Found", and "500 Internal Server" errors. You can style the error results, if desired.

Further details of how you can do this are outlined at: https://docs.joomla.org/Custom_error_pages#Customizing_Error_Messages In your case, the error being a 403 error.

Good luck!

Answer 2

You can resolve your problem by creating "Hidden" menu. Suppose you have some menu choices that require a user to be logged in, like "Submit an Article".

You would like all users to be able to see the restricted menu item, whether or not they are logged in. You can achieve below 3 possible cases-

1. If the user is logged in, they just go directly to the restricted menu item.

2. If the user is not logged in they are presented with the login form, and once they log in successfully, they continue on to the restricted page.

3. If they are not registered, they have the option to register or navigate to another page.

For further detail refer : https://docs.joomla.org/Auto_redirect_guests_to_login