You often come across websites where you don't have free access to all the sections: to be able to view the contents in certain parts of the website you need to register and obtain access credentials to enter these restricted areas.
A classic example is a company site, where access to the Members' Area is reserved for salespeople and partners to view documents and price lists, or portals that require registration to access contents that can be downloaded.
WebSite X5 offers the possibility to create a Members' Area in your website with a number of Locked pages, and access to them is granted to administrator and user groups.
To explain the theory, let's consider working on the website of a voluntary association that organizes various projects through a Central Coordination Team and a number of specific Committees. The institutional part of the website is open to the public, but the site also contains pages that are specific for each project, and can only be consulted by members of the committee that follow each one, and by the members of the Central Coordination team. There are 9 volunteers organized as follows:
Central Coordination team |
Project A Committee |
Project B Committee |
Project C Committee |
Member 1 |
Member 1 |
Member 1 |
Member 1 |
Member 2 |
Member 4 |
Member 6 |
Member 8 |
Member 3 |
Member 5 |
Member 7 |
Member 9 |
As you can see, Member 1 is part of the Central Coordination team and is also a member of each project committee.
Consider also that, in addition to the sections on each project, the association's website also includes a number of pages containing reference material that visitors can only consult after they have registered on the website.
If you are using the Pro edition of WebSite X5, the best way to handle access to the website is for the website author to manually create the users in the central coordination team and in each committee (because these users are known and in a limited number) and, at the same time, allow interested visitors to register themselves directly online.
You have to first create the website Map and add contents to the various pages before you can define a Members' Area and manage the profiles of the users who will have access to Locked pages.
On the basis of the organization chart above, we need to manually create nine users with access credentials, and organize them into groups.
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With the Pro edition of WebSite X5, if you intend to enable automatic user registration, so that visitors can register themselves and immediately obtain credentials for accessing locked pages, you first need to set up a database in which the registration data will be saved:
When the database is set up, you can enable automatic user registration:
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When you have defined the list of users, with their relative credentials, you can specify which pages in the website are to be locked, and who has access to them.
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WebSite X5 lets you manage not only user profiles, but also those of the Administrators. By default, an Administrator group already exists, and it contains one Admin user.
Unlike ordinary Users, the Administrators have access to all the Locked pages in the website. With the same credentials, they can access the online Control Panel and, if they are using the Pro edition, the WebSite X5 Manager app. The administrators can use the online Control Panel and/or the app to manage various aspects of the website, depending on the features that have been included in it. These could be, for example, website hit statistics, Blog and Comments and Ratings Object comments, user registration, orders and stock levels. |
If you are working with the Pro edition of WebSite X5, and Automatic Registration is set as the Registration Mode, all the data on new users who register is stored in the relative section of the online Control Panel and the WebSite X5 Manager app. To keep the list of users registered with WebSite X5 constantly up to date, you have to do the following:
The users in the Automatic Registration group can be moved to any other group. Once they have been moved to a different group, these users will be treated in the same way as manually-created users: their data can be edited in the User Settings window, and you can create aliases for them. When the list of automatically-registered users is updated, the following cases may occur:
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When the website is published on the Internet, each time a visitor tries to display a Locked page he will be asked to enter his e-mail and password. If these parameters are entered correctly, the Locked page will be displayed. By default, visitors have five minutes to enter their username and password. After five minutes, if no username or password is entered, the request for this information is repeated. The five-minute time interval is reset each time a link to a Locked page is made.
When you test your website offline, a warning message will tell you that the locked pages will be displayed without requesting access. The Members' Area will be fully operational only when the website is published on the server. |
Further information: