For those of you scoring at home, and possibly to help future forum users (e.g., the three-years-from-now me), here is what happened.
The plan that I gave Kyle to log in had no menu restrictions of any kind. The same was true of content and extension restrictions. Also, all the settings that should allow access to content mentioned earlier in this thread were set to be completely permissive. Finally, the CBSubsContent plugin was disabled. Kyle’s plan was active, expiring next March.
The problem was with the other plans. All of them properly allowed access to the menu items I set up for the member profile and for user login. But at the bottom of the list of menu item restriction possibilities under CBSubs>Plan>Integrations>Content>By Menu, there is a list of the seven enabled items of the Community Builder menu. Those were checked. I have no idea why, but I didn’t see them … yet at some point I or someone else must have affirmatively checked them.
Still, you could logically believe that with all the other settings set as they were, and with the CB menu items unrestricted in Kyle's plan, and with the CBSubsContent plugin disabled, that wouldn’t matter. And until last week, everyone could indeed log in. I can’t explain how they could, but they could.
At this point, it might help to give myself or someone else a reminder about how CBSubs Content protection works. To me, it's not intuitively obvious when you first see it. If Plan A restricts access to absolutely no menu items, then members with an active plan can see all menu items. Even if Plan B restricts access to menu item #27 without an active Plan B, Plan A members with an active plan can still see Menu Item #27. But once Plan A expires and the grace period ends, Plan A subscribers can no longer view menu item #27. They can view menu item #26 (if no other plan restricts it) for as long as they are a registered user, but they can’t view #27. In this way, other plans control what Plan A members can see once Plan A has expired.
What I still don’t understand is how an Active Plan A is restricted from seeing menu item #27, if you want item #27 to be restricted to, say, a more premium active plan. In my tests, Plan A (and any other active plan) has access to all menu items, regardless of the menu restrictions of other plans, so long as it is active. In that case, the menu restrictions for any one plan restricts access to those menu items for all inactive plans, but affects no active plans.
But that isn’t true of the Community Builder menu items. Even if Plan A is active and unrestricted, including Community Builder menu items, and if the menu items labeled communitybuilder/Login or communitybuilder/Profile View are checked as being restricted in any other plan, it wipes out Plan A’s ability to log in to the website at all. But if they have checked "Remember me" in an earlier login and have an active cookie on their device identifying them as being logged in, there is no restriction when they visit again.
Kyle, please grade that discussion and let me know what’s wrong. I'm especially interested in the truth or fiction of the paragraph in blue above.
Note to Nick:
For the next iteration of CBSubs documentation, please note Section 7.5.6.3 Plans icon area - Integrations Tab - Content sub-tab, currently on Page 340. It’s probably already on your to-change list. All the references to sections, authoring, editing and publishing are no longer valid, possibly because they had to be removed for Joomla 3.
krileon
