Free Knowledgebase - limiting staff rights.

[sfriz]

I'm *sure* I've seen someone else with this issue, but I can't seem to find it today in the forums. We wanted to limit the staff to only be able to view knowledgebase articles and not be able to insert, edit or delete them. These rights would be reserved for Admins. Also, we did not want the Staff to have the rights to add or modify knowledgebase categories.
Ideally, I would have preferred something along the lines of what can be found under 'Manage Groups' where the rights 'edit knowledgebase article', 'delete knowledgebase article', and so on for all the actions under the knowledgebase section could be explicitly set. Until such time as rights management like that is implemented, we made the following modifications to limit these rights to Admin level staff.
Three files were modified.
/modules/knowledgebase/knowledgebase.php
/modules/knowledgebase/staff_questions.php
locale/en-us/en-us.php

If the non-admin staff member tries to manage or insert a category, they are sent back to the dashboard.
If the non-admin staff member tries to insert, modify or delete and article, they get a blank page with an error message telling them they don't have the rights to perform the action.
Not snazzy, but it keeps the staff from unauthorized modifications to articles.

[sfriz]

I was able to move the knowledgebase rights limits into the AdminCP by making changes to these portions of code.
/modules/knowledgebase/staff_questions.php
/modules/knowledgebase/knowledgebase.php
/modules/core/config_permissions.php
/locale/en-us/admin_staffpermissions.php
/locale/en-us/en-us.php

I also imported some sql data to preload the db as the db seems to default to all the permissions being 'on' rather than off, so I inserted 0's .
kb_perms_insert.sql

The files are in the attached .zip file.
Quick Instructions:
Save your originals. Replace above listed files.
Insert data into db. (you may need to adjust the number of groups of data inserted - DON'T just blindly insert the data unless you have only 5 groups. (I trimmed the file down for readability as we have many more than 5 groups.)
Restart Apache.

This gives radio buttons in the Staff->Manage Groups section under each group in the Knowledgebase section.
Managing Categories allows creation and deletion of categories.
Managing Articles allows deletion, mass deletion, moving, etc.
Insert Articles allows group to add articles to the knowledgebase.
Editing Articles allows group members to edit/update articles.
With these changes, we can allow select groups to add articles to the knowledgebase, while only allowing other groups to read the articles. These even allow for letting a group edit, but not insert articles, or insert without letting them edit.