Stump the Panel: SharePoint Q&A

Hi, I'm using MOSS 2007 as the CMS for a website, with two web-applications one for creating, editing and maintaining the content wiht Windows Authtentication, the other Forms authentication and anonymous access to show the approved and "published" content. I now have a need for external proof readers to be able to login to the 1st web application and see all the content (draft and checked-in) but not to edit the content.

The standard AD and MOSS rights can be provided, though we find it is not possible out of the box or with a custom permissions group to let these people see all content regardless of its approved status. We've played a little with jQuery in the past and wondered if we could use it to remove or hide the options to checkin/checkout from the page list and from the page editing toolbar. If it was possible, then we would create a custom group of users that this should apply to.

I don't know if it is possible for jQuery (as its client based) to be able to determine the role of the user logged in and then to apply its magic for that role only. Any thoughts ?

Looking in the forum I've seen other suggestions for hiding buttons (viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1257) and (http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/1 ... th-jquery/)in the toolbars and these need to know the style element for each thing to hide or remove. I've got no idea how to find those for the context menu or for the page editing tool bar so any help would be greatly appreciated.

We have to use MOSS 2007 for the foreseeable future before an upgrade to 2010 where I believe the user rights there will allow this type of use. Looking forward to all your helpful ideas.

<been a couple of weeks and no reply yet. Have I really stumped the panel ??? >

I can tell you that where there is a will there is a way with jQuery. To a point at least!! It is possible to tell if a user is a member of a group using a webservice. I am not 100% familiar with how the forms authentication "authenticates" users and how they exist in groups. If they are in a SharePoint group, it should be rather easy to tell. AD presents a different problem though I am guessing this is not where they would be. With all that said, it would be a matter of some trial and error to find which selectors in jQuery will hide what you need. If it is on the page it most likely can be hidden in some fashion. The context menu does present a different challenge as it is drawn from some functions in core.js and uses some security trimming to provide all the options. The best approach I came up with is to use a custom Edit Control Block for that list/page and there are some examples out there for doing this. I had to do this and it gave me a lot of control but was somewhat difficult to figure out at first. You might also be able to use jQuery and it's delegate function to hide the options in the context menu but I have not tried that yet!