Refs #3807: provide special admin login form if not logged in in admin context

[jdalsem]

walled garden admin login form if access admin pages if not logged in

[jdalsem]

@cash this should make more sense and is more readable

[brettp]

I'm not sold on this use of the walled garden login index. Other thoughts?

[mrclay]

@brettp is the the concern that using that function basically lies to the system and could introduce side effects?

[jdalsem]

@brettp the only other, more decent, option is to rewrite the admin layout, because that layout is not meant to be used for logged out users. It probably takes a few elgg_is_logged_in statements to fix those, and a bit of css/admin to make the login form look nice.

[mrclay]

@jdalsem Agreed. 3rd party plugins may also extend the admin UI via hooks/extensions adding code that expects a logged in user, though I'm not sure how much we need to worry about that.

[cash]

The better solution may be to move the admin views to their own viewtype. Then we can define a single column and a two column layout in the admin viewtype. The login page would use the single column layout.

We discussed this during 1.8 development. I don't remember the reason for not doing this.

[brettp]

@brettp is the the concern that using that function basically lies to the system and could introduce side effects?

Yes. It's using a very specific piece of code for something it wasn't meant for. Feels hacky.

We discussed this during 1.8 development. I don't remember the reason for not doing this.

See #3893. tl;dr: more work to keep views in sync.

[jdalsem]

Then first #3893 needs to be fixed before we can do this.

[cash]

I'm closing this pull request. We can revisit in the future.