EU/DE legal compliance of SMF, especially Imprint and Privacy Policy links

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Okay... So what I'm saying is that just looking into one single (non-official) website and quoting just one sentence from this website is not the equivalent way to deal with this complex issue.

I know, and understand this. I have read the actual GDPR Articles, and the link I offered is simply explaining the regulations in a way that is compatible with how most EU countries have actually applied them.

Every site owner, every business, should of course do their own due diligence around this. It is a complex issue.
What we have tried to do here is basically to provide tools so that most of the requirements can be easily met, for most countries, in most use cases. There will always be exceptions, because the regulations themselves have exceptions upon exceptions. For example, if you were running a website for strictly personal use to communicate with a limited group of family and friends, you would basically be exempt of all these regulations completely in most EU countries, while at the same time if you were a large company running a support site with some ad space, you would probably need to comply with it all to a tee.
 

[Julius_2000]

Huh, that looks appealing indeed. Different theme, though. Did you have to move the SMF stuff to the left by yourself, or was that part of the theme already?

The whole theme has been heavily customized by me, including the footer. Apart for the extra html elements that I added to index.template.php,  it was just a small CSS adjustment to shove them around.

I guess, for the sake of the goal of this topic, the question should less focus on why the OP needs the additional links (yes, we in Germany have to provide them) but rather whether it's possible to create pages similar to "Agreement" within SMF. If it could be done rather easily, all those issues were rendered moot and links for Imprint etc. could be placed in the footer. So, is there an way to do that?

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Probably the easiest most straight forward way IMO would be to either build a custom page and simply link to it, or install a portal mod ( Example: ezPortal ) that allows adding custom pages directly to SMF.  A portal mod might also allow adding the pages directly to the forum menu. This mod could perhaps also work as a lighter option if you don't want a full portal Smf Pages System

[Julius_2000]

Probably the easiest most straight forward way IMO would be to either build a custom page and simply link to it, or install a portal mod ( Example: ezPortal ) that allows adding custom pages directly to SMF.

You mean external to SMF, not created through SMF? Isn't there a way to adapt the Agreement.php or something to that effect and then link the new page in the footer, just like the agreement itself? I mean, this SMF forum right here includes additional landing pages for "about", "support" etc. If that could be done for a customizable page, the OP would then only need to adjust them and put them where he wants them.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Yes, I meant a strictly stand alone page - If you want to make it fit SMF, and have all the SMF menu items available and so on, it is fairly easy to do with SSI https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/SSI_FAQ_Basic

[Julius_2000]

That looks interesting. I read through the ssi manual but I'm not quite sure yet how to implement it.

The first thing you need to do is open a new file somewhere in your site, and give it a .php extention. Then open your text editer for that file and write this code:

What does it mean to "open a new file somewhere in your site"? Or does it simply mean to write a php file and place it the server directory and reference it in the ssi.php file? Or does this solely refer to third-party hosting? I'm a little confused, sorry

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

That's a bit oddly worded, but it simply means you need to create an empty file and call it whatever.php, and then add the code in that file.
You can see SSI in use here https://www.simplemachines.org/community/ssi_examples.php

[Julius_2000]

That's a bit oddly worded, but it simply means you need to create an empty file and call it whatever.php, and then add the code in that file.
You can see SSI in use here https://www.simplemachines.org/community/ssi_examples.php

Ah, so it is possible to create an individual page which then could be populated with ssi functions etc?!? That would be quite helpful, indeed.
What would I need to do then to reference a customized page in the forum? Would I need to place the link via "include example.php" somewhere e.g. in index.template.php, like the footer? The manual does not really make it clear how to make the link appear in the forum. Or would I simply need to create an anchor with the href address for the forum plus adding the "example.php" at the end? Something like "https:/myforum/example.php" ?

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

You could for example add the link to the forum menu, the main menu is in Sources/Subs.php and you can add custom items to it, or you could just add a direct link to the page anywhere you want really (Like I just linked you to the example file) and if you have the SMF menu in your custom page through SSI it'll always be easy to get back to the forum from there. 

If you want to experiment, the example file should be included in the install package, so you can just copy it and play around
https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF/blob/release-2.1/ssi_examples.php

[Julius_2000]

You could for example add the link to the forum menu, the main menu is in Sources/Subs.php and you can add custom items to it, or you could just add a direct link to the page anywhere you want really (Like I just linked you to the example file) and if you have the SMF menu in your custom page through SSI it'll always be easy to get back to the forum from there. 

If you want to experiment, the example file should be included in the install package, so you can just copy it and play around
https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF/blob/release-2.1/ssi_examples.php

Thanks a lot! The thing I don't quite fully understand yet is how the link would actually look like. Would I just add the name of the newly created custom php file to a href url?
Something like this?

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<a href="https://myforum/example.php"?></a>

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

If you simply place it in your forum's root, yeah - that would be it basically. It's just a direct link to a php-file on your server, just like the forum's index.php.

Using your own forum as an example: https://forum.thechembase.com/ssi_examples.php

[Julius_2000]

Ah! Got it! So I can create a php file, make it an html dom doc like described in the manual you linked to and then, if needed, add certain ssi functions like the menu to make it conform to the forum theme for instance, and then just add the php file to the root and reference it anywhere in my index.template.

So this would actually help the OP too, I guess. Thanks a million!

One last question @Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen:
Is there a way to make the link to the css file reference the actual theme that is activated? Currently in that ssi_example.php, if I were to use exactly that example, for instance, the link is generated through

Code Select Expand

<link rel="stylesheet" href="', $settings['default_theme_url'], '/css/index.css">So instead of pointing to the default theme, would I need to bake-in our specific forum theme url or could that be written in a way that would just pull the /css/index.css from its current theme?

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Yeah, you should be able to just edit that to point to whatever file you want really - So for example

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<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://forum.thechembase.com/Themes/The_ChemBase_Theme_BF/css/index.css">

You could probably do some magic to get it to automatically change with the theme too, but I haven't really played around with that enough to give advice on that.

[Julius_2000]

Yeah, you should be able to just edit that to point to whatever file you want really - So for example

Code Select Expand

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://forum.thechembase.com/Themes/The_ChemBase_Theme_BF/css/index.css">

You could probably do some magic to get it to automatically change with the theme too, but I haven't really played around with that enough to give advice on that.

Alrighty, thanks! Perhaps I could "steal" from some variable in index.template.php that generates the forum url and then just add the directories for the stylesheets. Again, thank you so much!