Question

Is it possible to have anonymous users (or more specifically, users without a ‘member’ role) be redirected from a specific menu item to an alternative node of my choosing, maybe using custom_url_rewrite_inbound?

This would then enable me to have two versions of certain pages for members and non-members (it’s a site specific thing!).

Cheers.

Answer 1

Using custom_url_rewrite_inbound() for this would be somewhat similar to using a sledgehammer to adjust the angle of a crooked picture – can be done, but it is cumbersome and comes with the risk of causing some damage 😉

A better solution depends on what you want to achieve exactly, and how often (i.e. for how many nodes) you need to do it, so you should explain your scenario a bit more detailed. Some possible approaches include:

• ‘Enrich’ your nodes with data/fields for both versions, and adjust the actual output depending on user role
  • If you use CCK, you could use the fields permission settings for this.
  • You might also do some adjustments in the theme layer via custom node templates.
  • Another approach would be via hook_nodeapi() (operation ‘view’) from a custom module, removing entries from the content array depending on user role.
• Provide explicit redirection to other nodes depending on user role (your explicit question)
  • replace the standard node page callback via hook_menu_alter() with a custom one. Within that, you check the role. If it is ok, you just call the standard callback, else you issue a drupal_goto() (based on some general logic, if possible).
  • If the ‘special’ cases are rare, you could do this via hook_nodeapi() as well, again reacting to operation ‘view’, but you’d need to make sure that you only do this for node page views, not if the node is just displayed as a teaser along with others.
  • Implement hook_init() in a custom module, check the path (arg() or $_GET['q']) and the role, issue drupal_goto() as needed. (Beware of cached pages – if you need to cover those, use hook_boot() instead).

Etc. … – I’m sure there are more options, so you might want to provide more details on your problem/goal/scenario to allow for a more precise suggestion.