Joomla - Determining whether logged-in user is an Admin

Question

I am having tons of fun working on a big project that was, for reasons hard to justify, based on Joomla! (which I don't mean to criticise, Joomla! is great, just not for the task I am faced with currently) and when I googled for a way of determining whether the currently logged-in user is an Admin, I found a post that quite boldly recommends using the following code:

$user =& JFactory::getUser();
if($user->usertype == "Super Administrator" || $user->usertype == "Administrator"){ ... }

To me, this looks like a rather strange way of checking for Admin users. I would appreciate a $user->isAdmin() method to do this rather than a couple of hard-coded strings.

I fail to find a more elegant solution to checking for admin users within the Joomla! framework. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

Peter,

I concur on the joomla sentiments, we use .net/php here as well and have a few projects that were started on joomla for some unknown reason !!

amnyway, another finer grained approach may be to examine the actual rights that the user has, rather than them being suoper admin etc. you can get to this info along the following lines:

    $user =& JFactory::getUser();

    if ($user->authorize('com_content', 'edit', 'content', 'all')) {
            echo "<p>You may edit all content.</p>";
    } else {
            echo "<p>You may not edit all content.</p>";
    }

    if ($user->authorize('com_content', 'publish', 'content', 'own')) {
            echo "<p>You may publish your own content.</p>";
    } else {
            echo "<p>You may not publish your own content.</p>";
    }

i know it's still hardcoded but at least it's user specific, rather than priviledge specific. this approach does however allow you to target specific 'component' related priviledges, so might be useful for you.

I'll track the replies to see if there's a 'proper' answer as it definately is an omission.

jim

Answer 2

Hi Peter,

The following could be a hack on Joomla. I tried it and got worked.

Take the case of sessions

$_SESSION[__default][user]->usertype;

This will give the type of user logged in you can use this in any conditional statements

Answer 3

If ur joomla administrator username is admin then u can use below code aspeter described before

$user =& JFactory::getUser();
if($user->usertype == "Super Administrator" && $user->username == "admin")
{
  //... do what ever
}