CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am new to Civicrm. I find it a powerful, yet scarily unmanageable system.

My problem is following: I have a contribution page that I want to show differently to members and non members. To be precise, I don't want non-members to see it at all. The ACL and group setting that I can handle only let me manage ALL or NONE in terms of contributions and I have another page that I want to show to all anonymous users.

So. I want a fast, non-complicated fix. I want a hack or pretty much anything that works without having to extend the civicrm, as I am the biggest of novices to Smarty (even though I'm a professional in Zend) and to be honest, I feel very very constrained by it.

As it turns out, I am so much of a buffoon in Smarty that I can't even assign $_GET['id'] to a value to pick out the id of the specific little contribution page that I have.

I have tried all possible combinations of assign, print_r, {php} code (that doesn't set variables outside the php code - wth is going on).

Please do help me in this or I will never ever manage to get to the next step of learning this thing. Oh, and sorry if I posted this in the wrong area, please move post around as you see fit.

Thank you very much for the answer, it was genuinely helpful, especially the last little part in the last link (to get the user ID) and I finally got it to work as supposed. Millions of thanks, as I've lost over eight hours for that little little thing. For anyone that lands here through google, here is my working little hack:

{if ($smarty.get.id == 6) and $session->get('userID') < 1}
{php}
header('Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/');
{/php}
{/if}
In general, I am very very surprised to how barred in I feel in Smarty. I cannot assign variables as I want, I cannot use php-native functions as I want. It will take me a long time before I get used to Smarty in general and civicrm in particular. I can understand that some people might find the logical layout difficult, but I'm working with MVC for a living, how can it be so chaotic? Why are there functions in the views? Shouldn't that have been handled in the controller, or at least through general helpers to avoid duplicating code?

Why is extending the framework so non-linear? You add terms like user/2/ if you want to have a special setting for user 2, but what if I have a really specific wish and run out of chars while declaring the arguments in the name? And guys, why is every page littered with JavaScript? And I've seen JS redirects - what if I shut off js and go to precisely any of those pages?

I have so many questions to be able to understand this framework better. I'm sorry, after Zend, this just doesn't fit in my head... But then again, I can't let Smarty win

Well, thanks I guess. I'll surely be back for more adorable novice advice shortly.

Yes you can assign variables, there is an {assign
...and yes, that's different than PHP/jquery/whatever you are used to. Skim the smarty site should help you clarifying how to do things the smarty way (don't confuse it with how to do things the smart way, might be different

Well, this is the general kind of mindset with smarty that I have the biggest problems with. Every other framework I have encountered is building upon a language, extending it, merging it, improving it etc. Somehow, Smarty has decided to use an interesting form of replace instead. I'm not saying all of it is bad, many of the $variable|/*set looping bgcolors here*/ things are generally nice, but it feels like all the basic features have been removed. If I have to go through assign (which, I seriously believe is the wrong way of doing it), how can I get through such simple things as +=, .= etc? Why can't I access $_GET, $_SESSION, $_SERVER or $_COOKIE directly? If I reverse an array, do I have to reassign it to a variable? It feels like I'm on a white tie ball and custom dictates that people have to stand up and sit down everytime they touch a fork.