Skip to content

Joomla component to allow site users to validate their identities to external entities.

License

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

SilverPreece/joomla-staff-validator

Repository files navigation

Joomla Staff Validator

Joomla component to allow site members (staffers) to validate their identities when contacting people outside of the site organisation. If a site member is contacting someone via a method that is insecure or not easily verified, such as a phone call or most e-mail, this component can allow the person being contacted to validate the member as belonging to the website. A code is generated in advance by the site member and provided to the contact, who can then enter it into a public form on the website to verify its authenticity and the identity of the user who generated it.

Running Development Environment

This Joomla extension uses the JoomlaTools Vagrant Box for local development and testing.

This box uses NFS for its file synchronisation outside the box. Ensure that you have the required NFS tools installed before building the box. On Ubuntu, this is as simple as:

sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server

Once you have done this, you can run vagrant up to build the box. Because this box creates NFS records on the host, you should always run vagrant commands for this project from a terminal and not a GUI, so that you can provide passwords if needed.

First Run

The JoomlaTools Vagrant box is an excellent tool, but being an Ubuntu 14.04 box it's also getting quite long in the tooth and starting to show cracks. (Note: it seems this will be resolved soon!) On first run, you will encounter issues with Virtualbox Guest Additions not being able to correctly install itself, because the box is missing the required kernel headers. As a workaround for this, I recommend the following procedure for first run with this box.

vagrant up  
vagrant ssh  
sudo apt-get update  
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade  
exit  
vagrant reload --provision

This set of commands will build the initial box as far as it can go before the guest additions fail. At this point, you SSH into the box and run the latest apt-get updates, which will fetch the latest kernel and its associated headers. Finally, you exit the SSH session and reload the box, which Vagrant will then finish provisioning. This should get you to a working JoomlaTools box.

This procedure is only required on first run. In the long run, I intend to publish a Docker-based alternative running the same toolset, but I don't have time right now.

Accessing the Box

The JoomlaTools box uses fixed-IP private networking to expose its various domains. Once the Vagrant box has finished building, add the following line to your hosts file (on Linux this is usually at /etc/hosts):

33.33.33.58 joomla.box webgrind.joomla.box phpmyadmin.joomla.box

You should now be able to view the box's control panel at http://joomla.box