Users & Permissions

dotCommunity provides comprehensive user management functionality to all websites.

Through the pages in the Users & Permissions tab you can maintain a list of all the members of your community, specify exactly what they should have permission to do within the website, and use a simple interface to get in contact with them all via email. You can even allocate some of your members to be additional administrators to help you maintain the site.

Members

The members page lists all the members of your website and their current status. It allows you to add and manage your members and administrators.

For each member listed clicking on their name will display a page giving a small number of details of their account such as when they became a member of the dotCommunity service.

When viewing the list of members there are two possible "roles":

A member is someone who has joined your group as an ordinary approved member.

An administrator is someone with administrative rights to your site, and you can give administration rights to any member of your group. An administrator has the same capabilities that you do as the main administrator of your site.

Whenever someone applies to be a member of your website a needs approval link will appear below the approved link on the left hand side of the members list. To approve their membership click the link and then the approve link next to their name. Once a user is approved as a member you can change their role by clicking the make administrator or make member link. To stop a user being a member of your website click the remove link.

If you know the name and email address of someone you would like to invite to your website, click the invite link and fill in the details in the displayed form. If the invited person is already registered on dotCommunity they will get an email informing them of the invitation and asking them to click a web link to verify they want to join the group. If that person clicks this link then they are automatically made a member.

If the invited person is not registered on dotCommunity they will get an automatically generated email from the administrator of the dotCommunity service (not yourself) with the relevant web link to register for an account. Once the registration process is complete that person automatically becomes a member of your site, without the normal approval step.

Note, you must enter the exact email address of the user you wish to invite and the registrant must use the same email address when filling out their registration form.

This function does not work if your site is disabled or hidden (e.g. in development).

Welcome Email

This page allows administrators to configure an automatically generated email to be sent to all new members of their website, i.e. after their membership has been approved.

To personalise the Subject and Body of the welcome email modify the relevant fields in the form. When an email is being sent the following special keywords (including the curly brackets) will be replaced with the corresponding values.

{first_names} - The first names of the new member
{last_name} - The surname of the new member
{user_account_page} - The account details page for the new member
{site_url} - The url to your site

Examples of their use can be seen in the default email.

Once you are happy with the contents select enable in the form to have the system automatically generate emails for each new member. If you decide to disable the feature the system will continue to store your email for future use.

Send Email

Using this form website administrators can send an email to all members of their website, or to all the other administrators of the website.

To send a mail, fill in the subject and message fields and click send.

When sending an email the following special keywords (including the curly brackets) will be replaced with the corresponding values.

{first_names} - The first names of the new member
{last_name} - The surname of the new member