Campsite: UserManagement

User Management

Campsite's user management allows you to control access to the backend and the frontend of your publication(s). Backend users are called Staff users and frontend users are called Subscribers. You can define roles for your staff members, such as Journalist and Editor. The interface will change for each user depending on which permissions they have enabled. For example, a journalist will have a more simple interface than an editor.

Your subscribers are most likely paying for access to your content. When you edit an article, you have to option to make the article only viewable to subscribers.

IMPORTANT: Initially, the Campsite demo packages have only one user: admin with admn00 password. Make sure to change the password as soon as possible. Also, do not delete this user as it is needed by the email script which informs Staff users of events in the system. You should set the email address of "admin" after installation because it is used as "Reply-To" address in the notification emails.

Creating User Types

A user type is generally defined by the list of the tasks a user is allowed to do in a system. In Campsite, this list of tasks ranges from creating, managing, and editing publications, sections, and articles, to template management and definition of the publishing environment.

To simplify user management, Campsite allows you to create generic user types, which can then be assigned to multiple users, instead of taking care of every single access right for every single user.

Campsite comes "out of the box" with three default user types:

Administrator - user with full authorization, i.e. all rights (normally reserved to webmasters)
Chief Editor - user with higher editorial rights (e.g. has a right to create and delete issues)
Editor - standard back end user with rights limited to basic article management and editing (normally assigned to journalists and editors)

To create your custom user profiles, select 'Users'->'Staff User Types' from the main menu:

and then select 'Add new user type'. Proceed to select the rights that you want included for this type of user.

Creating Staff Users

To add a user, select Users->Staff from the main menu:

and then choose 'Add new user account'. You will see this screen:

You should specify the full name of the user, user name, password, and choose a predefined user type (i.e. one of the default types or your custom user types).

If you would like to further fine tune the rights assigned to a particular user, go to Users->Staff and click on the user name you wish to edit.

Setting up Subscriptions

In this section:

Username/Password Access
IP Address Subscriptions
Customizing the Subscription Form

Campsite allows you to control public access to your publication(s) through its built-in subscription module.

[TIP: If you want to have all your content freely accessible, you can bypass this feature by structuring your templates in a special way. For more information see "Creating Templates for your Publication" chapter.]

For now, you should know that all articles you create in your publication(s) are by default available to subscribers only. Publication editors or administrators have the right to make an article accessible to non-subscribers.

The way it works from readers' side is as follows: If a reader tries to access a non-public article, she is informed that she is not allowed to read the article but is provided with an option to subscribe immediately to that article or other articles or the whole publication. A temporary subscription is activated immediately (the duration of that temporary subscription is determined by the value you set for the 'Pay Time', For more information, see "Creating a Publication" chapter). During this period, the reader has a chance to effect the payment and consequently have her subscription extended by the administrator.

The publication's administrator is automatically notified of all new subscriptions by e-mail. Subscribers also receive automatically generated e-mail reminders that their subscription is expiring 14 days before the event.

[NOTE: The text of the subscription-expiry message is hard coded in the current version of Campsite and it reads as follows:

"Dear <reader>,

This is an automatically generated e-mail message. Your <subs_type> subscription (started on <start_date>) to publication <publication> will expire on <date> (in <number> days).

Please enter the site http://<pub_site> to update subscription."

Future versions of Campsite will allow for customization of the message and for its translation into multiple languages.]

Campsite allows you to control access to your site in two ways:

Standard UserName:Password pairs, which is suitable for individual users
IP Address access, which most institutional subscribers (libraries, universities, NGOs, companies, etc.) tend to prefer

As Campsite handles subscriptions at the publication level, all subscription-related variables are customizable from the Publication Configure screen:

First you have to select a time unit for your subscriptions; the time unit can be: days, months, weeks and years.

You can set two types of subscriptions: paid and trial. Paid subscriptions have the following properties:

Currency: the publication's currency. Even if the subscription request is sent and the currency is changed meanwhile, the information about the user's debt is correctly recorded.
Time unit cost per one section:

for one language: the price for access to a section in a single language
for all languages: the price for access to a section in all available languages

Default time period: the default duration of the paid subscription. This value is used whe a reader subscribes through the frontend (site). The period for a certain subscription can be modified however from the administration interface.

You can specify different default time periods for individual countries if you like. To do so, click on "Countries defaults". You will then have the option to "Add new country", i.e. create subscription preferences for a given country.

Username/Password Access

Campsite allows readers to subscribe to one publication at a time. Within a publication itself, the level of subscription is the section. The reader is able to select any section from the list of the publication's sections, and for each of them specify the period of time he would like to have a subscription for.

Before submitting his request, the user (reader) can evaluate the cost of the subscription and change it. At any time later, he can subscribe to additional sections. Once the user has subscribed to a section, he can't increase the period of time for the subscription until payment is done for that section.

Immediately after the completion of the subscription form, the reader has the right to view the site. By default, the reader has seven days to make a payment and have his subscription confirmed by the administrator or else the account is locked.

The authorized person can confirm the payment, so that the subscription remains active after the first 7 days. There are two options in the administration module for that: change the value of the amount that the subscriber has to pay, or change the number of days the subscriber is allowed to surf the publication's site. By default, if this sum is set to 0 (zero), the number of paid days is automatically set to the number of requested days.

The administrator (or any other user who has the rights to manage publications) has 7 days to confirm the payment. The confirmation is made from the main menu, by selecting User and then Subscriptions. The confirmation consists in changing the payment status (from 'no' to 'yes').

IP Address Subscriptions

The IP based access can be used to automatically log in users that have known IP addresses that never change. Examples of this are libraries, colleges, schools etc. The IP address-based access works by recognizing a computer as owned by a certain subscriber based on the computer's IP address. Subscribers with IP address-based access will be allowed to accesss the site without being prompted for user names and passwords.

To create an IP-Address subscription, go to the Subscribers screen:

You will get to a screen that looks something like this:

First create a regular user by clicking on "Add new user account", edit it by clicking on the "Full Name" link in the subscriber list and click on "Add new" link in "User IP access list management" table (see image number 3). The form allows the input of a group of consecutive IP addresses. If necessary, more groups can be added. The start IP address is the smallest address in the group, while the number of addresses sets the size of the group.

For example, if a university library had a group of IP addresses: 120.120.120.0 to 120.120.120.63 then you would fill in:

start IP address: 120.120.120.0
number of addresses: 64 = 63 - 0 + 1

It is not necessary to add anything to the templates or to inform the users who will be accessing the site through IP address authentication of the existence of this User Name/Password pair.

It is possible to search for users based their IP addresses. In the subscribers list fill in at least one box in the field named "IP address" from left to right. The administration screen will display all readers that have IP addresses matching the input. For example, if we had two clients, one with IP access group: 120.120.120.0:64 (start IP address 120.120.120.0, 64 addresses), the other one with IP access group: 120.120.140.0:64 then we will have the following results:

filling in 120.120 in the IP address field will return both clients
filling in 120.120.120 will return only the first client: the second client's IP access group 120.120.140 doesn't match our input
filling in 120.120.120.10 will return the first client
filling in 120.120.120.80 will return an empty list: the IP access group of the first client stops at 120.120.120.63

Customizing the Subscription Form

The subscription interface for the user is customizable. Depending on the user's status, several steps must be taken by a user in order to be able to read the publication. There are three possible scenarios:

The user has never subscribed. In this case, the user is served a subscription form (name, login, password, email etc). After the completion of this form, the user can start subscribing to any section
The user has already subscribed (i.e. is a known user to the system) but only to a few sections. In this case, he or she wants to add more sections to the subscriptions they have already made - some of which might have expired. The user should be served a different subscription form (reflecting his status as a known user).
The user is not known to the system even though his subscriptions are active (e.g. the subscriber hasn't logged for a long time). A login form must be supplied for such a user.

The template designer can customize all those forms by means of Campsite's template language.

EDIT