Collaborative Portal Server Sections<br/>An introduction to and explanation of Sections in CPS. An Introduction................................................................................................................... 2 Sections ........................................................................................................................... 2 Root of Sections.............................................................................................................. 4 Add a Section.................................................................................................................. 4 Local Roles ..................................................................................................................... 5<br/><br/>If anybody discovers any errors or major omissions from this document, please send me an email so I can fix it. Author Steve Meaker stevem@manitacc.com For more specific information, check the Nuxeo CPS websites listed below, or the text files that were installed with CPS. Nuxeo CPS Websites Nuxeo.com http://www.nuxeo.com - this is a French website. If you don't read French, skip this one. CPS-Project.org http://www.cps-project.org/ Nuxeo.org http://www.nuxeo.org/ Nuxeo at Zope.org http://zope.org/Members/nuxeo/Products<br/><br/><br/>An Introduction<br/><br/>This document is meant te be a part of a basic guide for beginning users of CPS. I hope it is useful to those just starting out with CPS. In this document I explain the use of Sections and Local Roles in sections. In all versions of CPS the basic site layout for the public areas of the site consists of one or more sections. A section is a container for published content, that is, content that has been submitted for publication to a section by a site member. If the content was accepted by a section reviewer it is then displayed in the section. If the reviewer rejected the publication submission then the content will not be displayed in the section. Local Roles determine who can see the content in a particular area of the site. Using Local Role assignments, sections can be made visible to the public, or they can be restricted to one group, or even one site member, or anywhere between. Local Roles can be set for both sections and workspaces. Figure 1 shows a screen shot of a CPS site that contains no content, other than the default items that were automatically made when the site was created<br/><br/>Figure 1 - The CPS program as it appears with no content added.<br/><br/>Figure 1 shows the appearance of CPS as it is installed by default. This appearance can easily be changed, either a little, or totally. An add-on product named CPSSkins makes the customisation of the site layout easy to do.<br/><br/>Sections<br/>A section in CPS is an area of the site that is created to hold published content. Depending on the options used for the section, it may be publicly available and visible to all site visitors and members, or it could be visible to only one user after they login. Any member or combination of members can be assigned permission to view, modify or manage any section of the site.<br/><br/><br/>Once created, a section can be assigned managers, reviewers and readers by using the Local roles assignment. Figure 2 shows the top of the screen after logging in.<br/><br/>Figure 2 - The Login success message and screen for a manager<br/><br/>I logged in as a manager so consequently Figure 2 shows two tabs labelled `Root of Sections' and `Root of Workspaces'. If you do not have the manager role assigned to you, you will not see these two tabs. My next step is to pick on the tab labelled `Root of Sections'. The screen will then show the Root of Sections (Figure 3). Notice the Object actions box on the right side of the screen. This lists the options available to the section manager.<br/><br/>Figure 3 - The Root of Sections and its Object actions box.<br/><br/><br/>Root of Sections<br/>What exactly is the `Root of Sections'? Strictly speaking it is a special type of section that is the container of all sections created in this site. You can have as many sections in your site as you want or need. Each section can also contain sub-sections. Every section will be `under' the `Root of Sections' in the site hierarchy. It may help to think of sections as a folder on your computer hard disk. There are restrictions on what can be put into a section directly. Almost any content you create on the site can be published into a section (more on this later), but you are restricted to creating only the items shown in Figure 4 directly in a section.<br/><br/>Figure 4 - The items that can be created directly inside a section.<br/><br/>Add a Section<br/>To add a new section is easy, just pick on the New option shown in the Object Actions menu. In this case I will type the name I want for the new section and pick the Add button. I will call the new section `Public Access Area'. Figure 5 shows the screen that next appears.<br/><br/>Figure 5 - Creating a new section<br/><br/>The `Hide this folder in the navigation' option is left at the default of No.<br/><br/><br/>Hiding a section is sometimes useful, but not for a public area that is to be available to anonymous viewers. I have found it is useful to hide a section that contains content that is referenced from other sections within the site. There are probably other reasons for hiding a section in the site navigation. Placing often used graphics and documents that are opened from hyperlinks within other documents makes it easy to ensure all referenced links from a document actually exist and can be opened. The reasoning for this may become a little clearer after you understand the Publishing process that documents go through when they are placed into sections for public or authorised viewing. More on Publishing later. After picking on the Create button in Figure 5 the new Section will be created. Figure 6 shows how the title of the new section (Public Access Area) appears near the top of the screen.<br/><br/>Figure 6 - The new empty section<br/><br/>After creating the new section it now needs to be modified so it can be accessed by anonymous site visitors. Any section that is available to anonymous users is also visible to site members. If you were to log out of the site now you would not see the new section that was created. Until you assign roles to the section it will be invisible to all except the site manager(s). This allows you to create and modify section contents and not be concerned about site visitors or members seeing the section or its contents until you are ready. When its finished, assign roles and it will then appear to others.<br/><br/>Local Roles<br/>In the Object actions menu is a command option called Local roles, which is used to assign access permissions to sections and workspaces. To make a section visible to anonymous visitors you must be either a manager or a Section manager. If you do not have approriate authorisation you will not see the Local roles option in the Object actions menu. If you can't see this option you can't access the Local roles command.<br/><br/><br/>Site members will see the Local roles option while they are in their own workspace, and in workspaces and sections where they have been granted the Workspace manager or Section manager role respectively. To change the section permissions, first enter the section by picking on the section name (Public Access Area in this example). Figure 6 shows how a section appears when first created. The box with Content created shown in Figure 6 only appears when the section is first created. A similar box, with the words Content changed will be displayed when you edit a sections name, description or &quot;hide in navigation&quot; property. When the section is open, pick on the Local roles option from the Object actions menu.<br/><br/>Figure 7. The Assign Local roles screen display.<br/><br/>The display shown in Figure 6 is typical for a newly created section. Until roles are assigned in the section it is only accessable to the site manager(s). As the lower part of Figure 6 clearly shows, there are no roles currently assigned in this section.<br/><br/>Figure 8. The choices for searching<br/><br/>To assign roles you first need to select the user or group to assign the roles to. After searching for and selecting the site members or groups to assign the roles to, you then select the roles to assign. The Search Term field (see Figure 7) allows for great flexibility in searching. You can enter a complete name, or use partial names. Searching for the charaters &quot;ev&quot; will display all users with &quot;ev&quot; as a part of their login name. The term you enter is matched against the whole of the user login name, so names such as Evelyn, Evie, Guinevere or Steve will all be displayed if ev is the search term<br/><br/><br/>It is important to remember that the Search by option User full name actually searches against the user login name, not their first name or lastname. If you want to select from all site members, select User full name and then use a blank or an asterisk ( * ) as the search term. Searching by Group name is similar, with one major difference. Figure 9 shows the results of searching by Group name with a blank search term. The three groups, SiteAssociate, SiteMember and SiteManager are groups that I created in my CPS. You won't see them.<br/>Figure 9. Group search result using a blank search term.<br/><br/>The two groups, role:Anonymous and role:Authenticated will only appear if you use a blank search term. These groups are built-in and cannot be removed or replaced. Using an asterisk as the search term will only display groups you create, not the two built-in groups role:Anonymous and role:Authenticated. As this section is going to be open to the public we need to select the role:Anonymous. Place a tick in the box next to this group. The next step is to assign an appropriate role. Figure 9 shows the choices available (in the expanded drop down list) for selection. It is unlikely that you would grant the Section reviewer or Section manager roles to anonymous users, so there is only one choice that is suitable. Select the Section reader role. It should be remembered that once a section is visible to anonymous visitors it is also visible to all members of the site, both before and after login. A Section reader can only read the content of the section. They can't add or change the content. The Section reviewer role allows members who are assigned this role to approve publication of content that is published into this section. Until content is approved by a section reviewer, section manager or a manager of the site it will not be visible to section readers. The Section manager role allows members to add or edit this section and sub-sections, and add or edit a Chat or a Forum in the section. They also inherit the reviewer role for this section. This role gives the member no extra permissions outside this section or its sub-sections. Once you have selected the role:Anonymous group and assigned the Section reader role to it you can pick on the Assign roles button (Figure 9).<br/><br/><br/>After assigning the role to the Anonymous user the screen will change to reflect the new role assignments for this section.<br/><br/>Figure 10. The new local role display for role:Anonymous users<br/><br/>Now that the Anonymous user has been granted read access to the section, the section will be visible to site visitors without them needing to login to the site. The next step is to assign a section reviewer and section manager to this section if needed. If you have many site members, you can delegate the reviewing or manager role to any site member you wish. If you have multiple sections, you can assign different members different roles in as many sections as needed. It is probably wise to restrict the reviewers, and particularly the manager roles in the site to as few members as is reasonable, given your site design and the number of site members.