Access Control
The access control system in SiteBuilder ensures that users or visitors
don't get to see pages that they don't have permission to access. This
is done transparently, and also applies to which options are available
to the users and editors at any given time.
For visitors, this means that no menu items or search results
linking to pages the visitor is not allowed to access will be shown.
If a visitor, using IntraSeek, performs a search for any pages
containing the word edit, he will be shown pages pertaining to
text editors or the editors of the site, but he will not be shown
links to pages in the content editor, although they are on the site
and a user with the right permissions would get to see them.
For users of SiteBuilder, this means that the view of the content
editor changes depending on where it is focused. When focusing on a
directory where you are permitted to write and edit files, you will
have buttons for editing, committing, discarding and so on. When
focusing somewhere where you are not allowed to change things - Maybe
when looking in the template directory, if you are not working with
template programming - and those buttons are not there any more.
Groups and permissions
So, how does this work? Every user is assigned to one or more groups
by the system administrator, and every group is then assigned
permissions to the different directories of the site.
For instance, you may be a writer and graphic artist, and are
therefore assigned to the groups Everyone, Editors and
Artists. The first group is a group where everybody is a
member, and which has permission to look at only the most public parts
of the site, such as the pages that are open to external visitors. The
group Editors has permission to access the content editor, and
to write in the directories that contains the source files for the web
pages. Artists has permission to write in the directories that
contain images.
Your coworker may be a member of the group TemplateHackers
too, in which case he will also be allowed to write in the directory
that contains the site templates. On the other hand, he might not be a
member of Artists, in which case he might look around in the
image directories but are not allowed to make any changes.
So, in effect your group memberships determine where on the site
you are allowed to change things, which parts you are allowed to look
at but not change and which parts you are not shown at all. As a
comparison, an external visitor would probably just be a member of
Everyone and as such would only be able to reach the public
parts of the site. Links to the content editor would not be shown at
all.
User management
Most of the management of users and permissions are handled by the
system administrators, but there is one thing that the user can handle
himself, and that is keeping track of and changing his password. This
is done by selecting the tab Configuration and clicking
Change password.
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