Permissions

A dotCommunity website administrator has complete control over when and how visitors are able to interact with their site through it's advanced permissions interface.

To modify site permissions click the Users & Permissions tab and then the permissions & sharing page. This page specifies the default access that different kinds of visitor have to the entire website, including all applications and content on the site. The administrator can then setup specific permissions for a particular application or piece of content, overriding these defaults.

The grid shown indicates different groups of potential visitors down the left hand side and the actions they have permission to carry out across the top.

The default set of potential visitors (1 in the diagram) is:

Registered Users - Visitors logged in on the dotCommunity service, but not a member of your website
The Public - Visitors who are not logged in
<Your Community Name> Administrators - The administrators of your site
<Your Community Name> Members - The members of your website

For more information on the types of visitor to your site read the People section of the manual.

If you would like to confirm who is a member or an administrator of your website please visit the members tab of your site's administration interface as laid out in the Users section of the manual.

The available actions (2) you can allow a group to carry out are:

Read - A user or group who is given the ability to read content. If you remove the Read permission from the group Public and Registered Users then only members of your site will be able to view your site.
Edit - A user or group who is given the ability to edit content and applications. For example being able to make a post to a discussion forum or the ability to post entries to a blog. This permission also automatically grants the Read permission
Admin - A user or group who has the ability to carry out administration functions, modifying any part of the site. This permission automatically grants the Read and Edit permissions.

In some cases permissions may be fixed as granted or removed, for example edit and admin for "The Public". This is done in cases where changing the permission could be very harmful to your site. For example in the case of "The Public" granting admin would allow any visitor the ability to change any aspect of your site.

If the group or person you wish to modify the permissions for is not in the list down the left of the grid, for example a specific named user, you may add them to the list via the Add User, Add Group by Name, and Add Group by Category administrator buttons (3). In both these cases the word "group" refers to the list of users of another website.

Example Configurations

1. A standard publicly readable website would grant the Read permission to the Public, and Registered Users. It would then grant edit to its members so they can upload photos and add comments to the discussion forums etc. The permissions would therefore be configured as:

2. A standard private website would grant no permissions to the public and registered users. It would then grant the Edit permission to the members of the site. i.e.,

3. An information only site would grant Read permissions to the members of the site. If public access was required then also grant read access to the Public and to Registered Users, allowing visitors to read but not modify content and have no access to interact with the site applications.

All website permission configurations are fixed to include Admin rights for the administrators of the site, otherwise as the owner you will not be able to access the administration pages anymore.