Better Joomla User tie-in

[lcdweb]

I realize that Joomla lacks the hooks to handle user registration/connection with CiviCRM the way Drupal does. Considering the lack of hooks, I think the existing CiviCRM setup does a pretty good job. Hopefully Joomla 1.5 will have improvements that make this connection easier.

One area that I would love to see more functionality, is controlling the Joomla user's status (enabled/disabled) through CiviCRM. Specifically -- I'm guessing I am not unique in that the member organizations I work with give members'-only access to their website. And of course the status of the member is defined through CiviCRM. Currently there's no way to automatically shut down a person's access to the website (change their login to disabled) when their membership expires. But this type of automated control would be incredibly valuable. There would probably need to be a way to override the disabling feature, and to make the overall control optional. I would think it could be added to the UpdateMembershipStatus script pretty easily. After updating, IF member status = expired, change corresponding Joomla User to disabled status.

It would also be nice to expose some of those Joomla user details to the CiviCRM interface, so you can easily see the person's status, and maybe change their information.

-Brian