Opus 2.30 Publisher's Manual  Product Overview  Installation and Set Up  Customising a Paper   Templates  Using Datacards  Using Objects  Author Maintenance  Activity Logging  Technical Issues  Appendices

Note that text shown in this style documents a feature which isn't in the current release but will be in the next release and text shown thus indicates a feature which is being removed in the next release.

If you find anything in this documentation which is wrong or unclear then please use the link at the bottom on the page to comment and we will update the page to correct it or make it clearer.

Author Maintenance

Creating New Authors

Only the publisher can create new authors. You will need the author's email address. Log in to Opus as usual so that you end up looking at the author menu. As the publisher your menu will have additional options at the bottom and should look something like this:

Select the "Create a new author" option. The fields which must be entered are: forename, surname, email address, telephone number, article signature and password. Forename, surname and telephone number are there mainly for your own information, although Opus uses your forename and surname (you are author number 1) when it creates the initial set of articles when a new paper is created.

If you put something in the article signature box articles are signed using that mail hyperlink to the author's email address using this signature as the hyperlink text.

Remember that the author can change any of this information once you've created them and they've logged in.

You're not finished yet: before an author can start writing articles for any paper you must give them permission to do so. That is explained below.

Modifying the Access Array

As the publisher you can write for any paper, but other authors must be given access via the "Modify the Access Array" option.

In Opus permissions are determined not by user but by group and can be set for each section and for each datacard type. An author can be a member of one or more groups.

Hence you might have a group called "Reporters" who can write articles in the news section, but can't write articles in the web pages section of the site so they can add new news, but can't modify the more static parts of your web site. Similarly in the case of the original Milton Village web site we now have a group called "Directory". Users in that group can update entries on the village directory (a datacard type) but they can't add or update articles anywhere else on the site.

The "Modify the Access Array" option lets you manage all of this. Don't forget to click on "Update" having made your changes to the array or they won't be saved.

This option also lets you create and edit groups. Within a group we have the concept of being trusted. Normally an author can only edit their own articles but a trusted author can edit any article. Trust is done on a group by group basis so an author can be trusted in one group, but not in another.

The same scheme to control access to who can upload images and who can update objects (the publisher can always do this).

The options an author is presented with throughout Opus are modified based on the access array so, for example, they only get an option to add news articles in the author menu if they have write access to at least one news section. So if you get a user complain they can't see an option any more then check their access permissions.

Finally Opus has the ability to restrict read access to parts of the site. An additional pseudo group is defined for readers (i.e. people who aren't signed on as authors) and you can prevent readers, and selected author groups from reading selected sections or datacard types.

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