Access Control List

The Access Control List function of Joomla controls which part of the content users are able to see or which actions they can take.
The restrictions are applied for groups. Each group can be thought of as a role that a user will have within the website. Keep in mind that one user can be a member of one or more groups within Joomla. If desired, groups can have parent groups. In this case, they automatically inherit the Access Levels of the parent group.

Auction Factory comes with its own ACL system implemented that uses Joomla groups, and that can assign them to either Bidders or Sellers, having automatically set restrictions for accessing various pages of the component or taking certain actions. With this feature configured, when a user wants to visit a specific page, the system checks the permission for this combination of user and action. If it is allowed, then the user can proceed. Otherwise, the action will not be allowed.

Upon installing the component, you will need to follow some simple steps in order to have a fully operational ACL system and to separate bidders from sellers.

First and foremost, you will need to create specific groups for them.

• 1. From Joomla's Administrator Menu go to users and choose Groups section to define Bidders and Sellers groups.
  

There, add at least two new groups, preferably with the names "Bidder" and "Seller", but you can add what suits your website better.
Group Parent, for both of them, must be Registered.

• 2. Define two new Viewing Access Levels for the newly created groups.
  

First access level:
Level Title - Bidder
AND check 'Bidder' in the list 'User Groups Having Viewing Access'.
Second access level:
Level Title - Seller
AND check 'Seller' in the list 'User Groups Having Viewing Access'.

• 3. From Joomla's Administrator menu go to Menus/Menu Manager and click on Auction Factory MENU. ((!) this is an optional step which will hide some menu items that can't be used by all groups)

Set access level group to 'Bidder' for menu items: 'Watchlist', 'My Bids'.
Set access level group to 'Seller' for menu items: 'New auction', 'My auctions', 'Blacklist'.
You can leave 'List auctions', 'Search', 'Categories' and 'Profile' with Public access or only for Registered, as you consider.

• 4. From Auction Factory's menu go to Settings/General Settings and click on the ACL tab to set Auction menu item access for groups:

On the 'Bidder Groups' click on 'Bidder' to choose this from the list of available groups.
Do the same for 'Seller Groups' by choosing 'Seller'.
Afterwards click on 'Save'.

(!) Documentation based on Auction Factory version 4.5.1