Closed Forum Guest Page

[Thesealion]

Is it possible to have one page of your forum open to guests and the rest closed? Or if you have guests must login is that not possible?

[Sophia]

I think you'd have to open your forum for guests (so that they won't have to log in to view your main forum), and then set all your boards to private.
Go to Admin -> Structure -> Categories & Boards -> Edit properties of the board you wish to edit -> Settings -> Set "Private board" to "YES"
You'd have to do that for all boards except the one that you open up for guests.

I don't think there is any other way... but if so I'd like to be enlightened

[Brian]

Do you mean like the old Guests Must Login in V4?

It's possible with a Layout Template mod, but you'll have to manually edit the page's HTML whenever you want to change anything.

[Thesealion]

Yes, I have guests must log in set, but I would like to be able to let people with pending accounts know that they can speed up their pending account by emailing us. With how the login page is set up right now I can't even put a link on the login page for them to visit another site with a message or even a link to email. I can put a message, but I know for a fact that people aren't following the link in the message cause it renders as text.

Now I understand not wanting HTML on the page, but I think it's a bit much to totally shut people down and not allow them to talk to guests if they close their forum to guests. Our forum is closed to random people, but if we know you, we want you to let us know who you are so you can join. Right now we have no way of asking them to contact us...

[Brian]

The layout templates page won't let you remove the page content completely, but you can at least hide it.

Go to Structure > Layout Templates > Forum Wrapper. Make sure your forum's default theme (the one that will show for guests) is selected in the theme dropdown.

Find the $[header] line and place this below it. You can change the text in red to whatever you want. The first text is the window title and the second text is the window content.

            {if !$[current_user.is_member]}
            <div class="container">
                <div class="title-bar">
                    <h2>Welcome!</h2>
                </div>
                <div class="content pad-all">
                    If you're a guest you're seeing this box. Shazam!
                </div>
            </div>
            {/if}

Now change <div id="content" role="main"> (which should be directly below your previous changes) to this:

<div id="content" role="main"{if !$[current_user.is_member]} style="display: none;"{/if}>

This should achieve a look similar to the Guests Must Login feature of V4 on every page a guest has access to.