View Site As not working for Unpublished Sites

Verified on 23x: https://qa23-maria.nightly.sakaiproject.org/, build: 95360fb5 that the user is no longer kicked out, but https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/browse/SAK-49951 is an issue

Tested on 25x: https://trunk-maria.nightly.sakaiproject.org/, build: 1a74eeaa and 23x: https://qa23-maria.nightly.sakaiproject.org/, build: 586bbb76

User is no longer kicked out of the site, but the navigation and pinned/recent info is gone from the navigation. See https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/browse/SAK-49951

in https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/browse/SAK-49689 “View As” functionality has been restored to unpublished sites.

For about a decade at my institution, we’ve set an expectation with our faculty that they can use ‘View Site As’ prior to publishing a site as one (albeit limited) tool for them to build confidence in assessing if the they’re ready to proceed with publishing the site. Thus at least for my institution, preventing unpublished sites from being previewed w/ ‘View Site As’ would be experienced as a regression. Thus, I’d be in favor of proceeding with an approach that Earle alludes to-- one “handled by the security service so that the permissions would behave consistently”.

I took a look into this and believe that “View Site As” should not appear for a site that is unpublished.

The reasoning for this is that there are specific security checks for the permission site.visit.unp for which a student would generally never have.

When switching to the student view, permissions should be followed and not bypassed in a way to elevate the users capability as this would have consequences.

The views/ui are designed to follow the permissions and doing something like this would simply make those views more complex.

And if we did need to proceed with something like this then it should be handled by the security service so that the permissions would behave consistently.