Permissions are a great way in which to control who can see different areas of your site. By using permissions, it empowers you, as an admin, to customize a users experience on your community. It may be that you have a staff area you want only members of your moderation team to view, or even a premium area that you sell to your members.
Within the Invision Comunity platform, we provide various different ways in which to manage what a user sees, both from a staffing point of view, and that of a member. Here we will discuss how to set up the member side of permissions, by the use of groups and modules. Along with a brief overview of other areas you may see across the suite relating to control of your membership.
Permissions on the various areas of the platform are controlled by Member Groups. Please take a look at our Member Groups guide, if you are not yet familiar with these.
Permissions can be accessed from either the Member Group screen in the ACP, or from the application in which you are changing permissions for. Which way you access these, would depend on what you are trying to achieve. For example, if you wish to do all the permissions for an individual group, you would visit the following location:
Members -> Groups
Once there, select the lock icon at the side of that group.
Select the lock icon to access permissions
(nb: In some areas, this may be under the dropdown on the right)
You will see a similar option within this location:
Community>Forums
or indeed many other areas where there are categories such as Gallery, or Downloads.
Choosing from the group page would give you the following, where you can choose all permissions for that member group, as shown in the following image.
Permissions for our 'Members' group
When selecting the permission (lock) icon at the side of a forum/category within an application, you will see a similar set of checkboxes, but this time it would show all groups permission for that forum/category.
Permissions for a gallery category
In this way, you can quickly and easily set up new permissions for a newly created category, forum, or member group, without the need to go into each item.
It is important to note that permissions will be added if they are on any group in which a member has. Therefore if a member has 2 groups set, one with a permission and one without, they will gain that permission.
Within the software, there will be times that you wish to restrict an application, or application module, in its entirety on your system. Using the member group permisions for this can often not be effective. You may, for example, want to completely remove the contact us section, or remove the PM system from a given group, as if it doesnt exist. For this you would use module permissions.
To apply permissions to a module, first of all, go to the following area within your ACP:
System -> Site Features -> Applications
Expanding any application will give you a list of modules in which that application contains. Note. that unlike regular permissions, these will give you the option to completely remove functions as if they do not exist to the end user.
Applications overview
Clicking the permission/lock icon at the side of any module will give you the ability to restrict access to only specific member groups. So for example, if I wanted to remove search entirely from guests, I would click the icon, giving me the following where I can deselect 'guests'
This would completely remove all search functionality on the site, for any user who is not logged into the site.
You will see in many sections, you can set custom permission error messages. This can be helpful in situations where you wish to direct your members to another area, such as signing up to a subscription to be able to access a specific forum. You can see an example of this in the image below, which is on the forum setup screen.
Custom Permission Error
As you can also see from the above, there are other areas in which permissions can be set. These are items in which are global in nature such as upload limits, or area specific rather than group specific.
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