On Mar 17, 2010, at 8:36 PM, Cynthia Dusharm wrote:
I just pasted the report I sent out prior to the meeting last night. I know the info is not public, is it to be saved under registered or special?
Cindy,
You asked a great question and one that I’ve never fully addressed. I hope you won’t mind me using your question and your entry as an example for how to set the access level to any information we post. I’ll also point a few other items that need to be checked.
When you are creating or editing information (referred to as an Article) to be posted on our website, there are several important settings to check before you finally save it. Below is a screen shot of of Cindy’s article on the personnel committee notes where I can point out these items. This screen shot has only a portion of Cindy’s actual text. It’s the settings below the text that I want to point out. Immediately below the text are a series of buttons that you can use too, but I will explain them in another HOW-TO article that I will post online under Internal Documents.
Our website is organized by two fundamental structures– Sections and Categories.
Section: A Section is similar to a newpaper section. We don’t have a business, sports or comics section, but we do have the following Sections:
- About Us
- Adoption
- Ways to Help
- Resources
- PHS Community
- Administration
Category: Within each Section are “Categories”. Every article you post MUST have a Section and a Category. In Cindy’s article below, she choose “Administration” as the Section and “Operations-Personnel Committee Items” as the Category. Recall that “Administration” is the private, internal-use only area of our website, so Cindy’s article is in the correct Section and is the right Category for her particular committee report.
Published – Show on Front Page: There are two “radio buttons” — “Published: ” and “Show on Front Page: “. Normally, when you create an article you will want to publish it so that button should be “Yes”. However, you can save an article and NOT publish it until later. That’s what Start Publishing: is for (see below).
Author Alias: Every article has an author. The author is set automatically by your name when you log in. However, you can put another name in the “Author Alias”. If you look at many of the articles on the website that I posted, you will find “PHS” as the author. I didn’t want my name on all of those articles, so I just used that alias for them.
Start Publishing: You put the date you want the article to appear and that’s when it shows up and not before then. By default, the date in Start Publishing: is the date you created this article.
Finish Publishing: If an article will no longer be relevant after a certain date (for example, fundraising events that have passed), you can put that date in Finish Publishing: and your article will no longer appear to the public after that date. It has not been deleted though. It’s still available to you and other board members. We can archive articles or delete those articles later. That will be one of the maintenance jobs the PR committee will need to address and perform.
Access Level: Here is where I address Cindy’s question. There are three Access Level settings: Public, Registered, and Special. Public means anyone can see it. Registered means only registered users who log in can see it. A Registered user is any member of the public who registers for an account on our site. Special is what you all are. Only Board members, Anne and the staff are Special.
By default “Access Level” will be set to Public. This is what Cindy’s article is set to now but is NOT what she wants. She only wants internal-use access to her notes so “Access Level” should be set to Special. When you create an article you will need to check this to be sure internal-use only articles are marked Special. Here’s how it works:
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Access Level. Who has access to this item. Current options are:
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Public: Everyone has access
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Registered: Only registered users have access
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Special: Only users with author status or higher have access
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NOTE! Even though the public cannot see our Administration menu and or to our internal-use only area, there are a number of places where the site displays Latest Info added to our site; that is, articles recently posted. If you don’t set your article to Special, it will show up under Latest Info.
Ordering: When you have several items listed under the same Section and Category, you can control the order in which they are listed. That’s what the Ordering drop-down menu (shown below) does. The default setting is to place the newest article first. So, if you want your article somewhere else on the list, or last, use the Ordering setting to select the position you want your article in. Most of the time, this will not matter. You probably want the article you are creating to be first (the top item) in your list.