Page ownership

One recurring task of any plugin will be to determine the page ownership in order to decide which actions are allowed or not. Elgg has a number of functions related to page ownership and also offers plugin developers flexibility by letting the plugin handle page ownership requests as well. Determining the owner of a page can be determined with elgg_get_page_owner_guid(), which will return the GUID of the owner. Alternatively, elgg_get_page_owner_entity() will retrieve the whole page owner entity. If the page already knows who the page owner is, but the system doesn’t, the page can set the page owner by passing the GUID to elgg_set_page_owner_guid($guid).

Note

The page owner entity can be any ElggEntity. If you wish to only apply some setting in case of a user or a group make sure you check that you have the correct entity.

Custom page owner handlers

Plugin developers can create page owner handlers, which could be necessary in certain cases, for example when integrating third party functionality. The handler will be a function which will need to get registered with elgg_register_plugin_hook_handler('page_owner', 'system', 'your_page_owner_function_name');. The handler will only need to return a value (an integer GUID) when it knows for certain who the page owner is.

By default, the system autodetects the page_owner from the following elements:

Based on the route definition:

  • If the name starts with view or edit the parameters username and guid are checked
  • If the name starts with add or collection the parameters username, guid and container_guid are checked
  • If in the route definition the value detect_page_owner is set to true the parameters username, guid and container_guid are checked

The legacy URL detection is tried if the route detected didn’t result in a page owner:

  • The username URL parameter
  • The owner_guid URL parameter
  • The URL path

It then passes off to any page owner handlers defined using the plugin hook. If no page owner can be determined, the page owner is set to 0, which is the same as the logged out user.