Obsolete:Unsolved problems in roles

Yesterday I wanted to start full conversion of modules to new roles, mainly remove isteacher(), isguest(), iseditingteacher() and isstudent(). I stopped sooner than expected. Here is the list of problems we should solve before going ahead with roles conversion.

Guest access

Originally we used require_login() and isguest() combination. require_login() to be discussed later. I guess we should move to capability checks only and stop doing special checks in modules. We can not assign guest user to Guest role now. Part of the upgrade should be assignment of guest user to guest role if we had open guest access.

Solution

• allow assignment of guest user to at least Guest role
• fix upgrade to assign guest role if needed
• fix course config GUI

Access without login

Till now we used empty($USER->id) or isloggedin(). If we want to control everything using capabilities we need new notlogged user and Not logged role plus legacy capability site/legacy:loggedin.

We should also eliminate $CFG->forcelogin that was used when we wanted to give access without login to resources at site level.

Solution

• automatically create user notlogged - either in memory only or in database
• load notlogged user in $USER if not logged
• do some automatic assignment or capability overrides in upgrade
• remove empty($USER->id) from core
• rewrite require_login() or obsolete it by has_capability() with parameter to login if needed.