Joomla's WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor a.k.a. the visual editor is implemented by the Editor - TinyMCE plugin. You probably knew that. What you probably didn't know is that it has profiles which are activated automatically per user group. In other words, you can change the amount of functionality exposed by the TinyMCE editor depending on who is logged into your site!
This is very useful for presenting a simple, intuitive and functional editor to your clients filing tickets.
It is recommended that you create a configuration set for the user groups your clients belong in.
Go to , Manage, Plugins.
Edit the plugin Editor - TinyMCE.
Go to the Advanced tab and set the
Number of Sets option to
4.
Click on .
Click on the Set 3 side tab. In the Assign this Set to field clear all of its contents and select the user groups your clients belong in.
Right above the sample toolbar click on . By default this only adds the following buttons:
-
Bold
-
Underline
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Strikethrough
-
Undo
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Redo
-
Unordered list
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Ordered list
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Clear formatting
You might want to also add the Add link amd Remove Link buttons by dragging them into the toolbar from the All available menus and buttons area at the top of the plugin configuration page.
Do NOT add the Insert/edit image button! This is a very inconvenient interface which requires the user to type in an image URL. Instead, keep reading the next section of this documentation for a very convenient and simple way to add in-line images without exposing your entire Media Manager gallery to your users.
Also note that you do not see a very familiar button: the CMS Content dropdown. This is added automatically by Joomla itself if there are any buttons to show — like the Media icon which allows users to insert images and other media files in the body text.
The most common use case for attachments is your users attaching screenshots or other image data necessary to clarify their point.
Images as attachments are perfectly possible but inconvenient. The support person has to download them to their computer first to inspect them. It is more convenient if the client can upload an image and display it in-line, in the body of their ticket text or ticket reply.
Unfortunately, Joomla's default use case is that images are only meant to be uploaded by people with the authority to create content (articles) on the site, i.e. Authors, Editors, Publishers, Managers, Administrators and Super Users. The image button in Joomla's TinyMCE editor opens the Media Manager which gives the user access to all of the site's images. They could delete or overwrite existing images or even upload images in places you don't want them to.
The traditional approach to that was disabling the image button for regular users or using a third party editor, such as JCE (JoomlaContentEditor), which supports per-user image directories.
With Joomla 4 this is no longer the case. There is a free of
charge plugin called RestrictedFS,
written by Dimitris Grammatikogiannis, a regular code contributor to
Joomla itself, which limits each user's Media Manager access to a
specific subdirectory
(images/user/
where userNameuserName is the actual username of
the currently logged in user).
![[Note]](/media/com_docimport/admonition/note.png) | Note |
|---|---|
|
Caveat: images uploaded through the Media Manager, even in a folder restricted by RestrictedFS, do not count as Akeeba Ticket System attachments. As a result they are a. publicly visible to anyone with the URL to the image and b. not removed when you run the scheduling command to remove old attachments. You need to weigh these two factors before enabling this feature. |
First download and install the RestrictedFS plugin.
Go to , Manage, Plugins and look for the plugin called Restricted File System. Enable the plugin and edit its options.
In the sole options, Jail User Groups,
remove the Registered group which is there by
default and add the user groups your support clients belong to. If
you were following along our quick setup tutorial that'd be the
Customer Support group. Click on .
Caveat: Any user, including your support staff which is
assigned to one of the user groups selected in the Jail User Groups
option (or any of its children groups) will be unable to select
and/or manage images outside their own user directory under
images/users. In most cases this is perfectly
fine; you don't want to give your support staff too much latitude.
We are mentioning this because it's so obvious that it is easily
overlooked — it happened to us while writing this
documentation.
Go to , and click on the button, the the Permissions tab.
Find the user group your clients belong in and click on it.
Set the Access Administration Interface,
Create, Delete and
Edit permissions to Allowed.
Yes, you really need to add the “Access Administration Interface”
permission; it allows the user to view the images on their
restricted folder. If you do not explicitly allow this permission
the user is unable to upload, delete or change any image!
Repeat if you have more than one user groups where clients belong to.
Click on .