Working With Mambo
Managing Registered Users & Visitors
One of the main features of Mambo is the ability to have your visitors register
to your site. In this way, you can control what the general public sees, and
what is available to members only. You can also determine what areas they may
contribute to (if any), approve their submissions, and even create custom menus
for certain user classes. We've already covered ways to do this in each previous
section. Finally, we'll cover how to manage user accounts.
Setting Up Registered User Access
Go to Site -> Global Configuraton. Be sure the
Site tab (first one on the left) is selected.
To allow users to register at your site, set Allow User Registration to
'yes'. If you set it to 'no', then visitors will not be able to register to use
the site. This is preferred for those who maintain a specific site themselves.
Setting Use New Account Activation to 'yes' will result in the user being
sent an email to activate their account by clicking on a link in the email before
they can use their account.
Require Unique Email should be set to 'yes' to prevent users from regietering
different names under the same email address.
Note that registered users may get one or two emails. One is a confirmation of
registration to your site. The second may be sent if you have set to have all
registered users activate their account via email.
Managing Users And Access Levels
If you would like some of your registered users to be able to access different
features such as posting articles or even set them as administrators, you can
do so from Site -> User Manager. To get started,
click on the name of the user you wish to change settings for.
From here, you can change their name, username, password, access level and more.
Looking at the Access Level, you see you have many choices:
Public Frontend: This is the category the others fall under, meaning that
users in this category can log into the site from the main page.
Registered: A registered user. These users usually do not have any special
priveledges to post articles. But you can control what they see by setting some
of your content to the Registered Access Level. This way the general
public will not see those content items but users who are in the Registered
category can.
Author: These users have all the same abilities as Registered users plus
the ability to add and edit new content to the site, such as articles. These
users can also log in via the front page of the site. Any content added is not
visible to the public until a user with administrator type or publisher access
approves and publishes the content.
Editor: These users can add and edit anyone's content that is
posted on the site. Like the Registered and Author users, they too can log in
via the front page of the site. Any content added is not visible to the public
until a user with administrator type or publisher access approves and publishes
the content.
Publisher: These users can add and edit any content to the site,
just as the Author and Editors can. However, they can also Publish content
or make it available on the site. They too log in via the front page of the site.
Public Backend: Tharea contains access levels to private areas that
Administrator type accounts can log into. This is a separate page they are given
a link by an administrator to log into, and so they do not log in via the
main page. The link that these users should use to log into your site management
area is http://cgi.yourdomain.com/mambo/administrator where yourdomain.com
should be replaced with your actual domain name and mambo be replaced by
the name of the directory you installed mambo into.
Manager: Managers can manage content and menus.
Administrator: This level allows access to most of the administrator
functions including installing and removing components (add-ons), mambots and
modules, managing users and content, and working with the menus.
Super Administrator: This level allows access to all administrator
functions. It's best that the domain owner be the only Super Administrator
of the site.
Note that Authors, Editors and Publishers are also considered Special
users. So you can set content access levels to Special for those areas
you wish to have only these users see and not the general public.
If you set your user up as Administrator or higher, you can click on their
name again in the User Manager page and set them up to recieve user submissions
as well.
Finally, you can also set to block any particular user on the site.
Setting Up Registered Users Without Registration
You can also have your site set not to allow users to register from the site, but
still let them log in. You can add, delete and modify users from the
Site -> User Manager page. To add a user, simply
click on the New icon at the top of the page and add that user's information.
Once set up, your new user can log in via the main page. The new user will also
be emailed their user login information. However, the link to the site will
be given for the front page of the site. If you have set up the user as a
manager or administrator, you will have to give them the administrator login
page link separate.
Deleting A User
To delete a user, go to the Site -> User Manager
page, click on the box next to the user you wish to delete and then click on the
Delete icon at the top of the page. Note that this deletes all of the
user's account information, but you may need to delete any contact information
first, if you had set any up for this user.
Forcing A User Logout
If you would like to force a user to log out, you can go to the
Site -> User Manager page and click on the
Force Logout icon at the upper right of the page. This causes the user
to be automatically logged out, requiring them to log back in if you had not
blocked them, otherwise they would not be able to log back in.
Setting Up User Contact Information
Go to Components -> Contacts -> Contact Categories
and you'll see you can set up several categories to organize user contact information.
This might come in hany if you have several people working on the site such as
managers, administrators, or just keeping registered user contact information.
Normal registered users can not add to this area. An administrator would be the
only one to add this information.
To manage the publication of contact information, go to
Components -> Contacts -> Manage Contacts.
You'll note that you can also Publish a user's contact information if
you wish for this information to be displayed on your site's Contact page
to the public. Otherwise, to keep a private database of user contact information,
set the user to unplublish but clicking on the icon in the Published
column and ensuring the resulting icon is a red 'x'.
To add user contact information, click on the New icon on this page, and
fill in the contact information. Then click the Save icon at the top
of the page. You can also edit and delete contact information without affecting
the user's actuall account. Note that when editing or adding contact information,
you can use the Parameters tab on the right site of the page to further
determine what information can be displaed to the public from the contact
information entry.
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