if the current page is an object of some kind such blog,poll,page etc. you can call

echo "<b>Access:</b>" . $vars['entity']->access;

which will show you the access of the entity/object you are looking at. So you could do the following:

if(($vars['entity']->access == ACCESS_PUBLIC) || ($vars['entity']->access == 0)){

//show stuff

}

that should work for you.

@T: access == 0 is private.. r u @ typo ? ;-)

oh yeah, my bad. should be a 2 not a 0.

Thank you for your responses, but this doesn't work, so I will explain my problem more.

I'm using elgg 1.8.0.1 and I'm extending sidebar view with:

elgg_extend_view('page/elements/sidebar', 'myplugin/extend', 500);

And I call in my view:

print_r(array_keys($vars));

So I always get this when some content is rendered:

Array ( [0] => content [1] => sidebar [2] => user [3] => config [4] => url )

But $vars['content'] is html code and no $vars['entity'] is avalaible.

¿Maybe can we get the entity through a hook?

I noticed a similar "fail" about the always present sidebar RSS feed button. For example, if I link the RSS feed to blog posts of foo user and these posts doesn't have public access level, elgg shows an access error when triying to use this link in a RSS feed reader.

Is not useless trying to link a RSS feed that doesn't have public content?