This is another thing I’ve been scratching my head about a bit recently. Renaissance provides full support for multiple site administrators (as well as users on the front end). It has the usual basic infrastructure one needs to have things working smoothly:
- Checkouts, to stop different administrators working on the same content at once
- Administrator roles, so one can differentiate between one’s SEOs and user managers
- Change logs, so one can see who updated what, when
- et cetera
There are also a few slightly more advanced tools (which I’ll go into in a second), but I’m really feeling a bit ignorant about what other packages provide (if anything) and a bit bereft of ideas for what I should be adding.
More tools
Okay, I mentioned that there’s some more advanced stuff. Well, slightly more advanced. Here it is:
Locks
Every administrator in Renaissance has their own lock level. A level of zero is the highest, going down to whatever you like (although realistically, probably five or six levels). Any administrator can then lock any piece of content (whether that’s a text item, a list, a page or even a set of core system settings) against either editing or deletion. That stops any other administrator with a worse lock level than them messing around with that piece of content.
Although this has a bit of overlap with the access permission system, it’s very useful for protecting key settings areas or individual pieces of content. It offers a kind of finer granularity to access permissions I guess.
Alerts
Very simple. Any administrator can create email alerts for themselves for the creation or deletion of any content types on which they want to keep an eye, or the deletion or editing of particular content items. Alerts can be sent individually, or as part of the administrator’s daily digest email.
Access permissions
The back-end access permissions system is, well, fairly comprehensive at the moment. It’s not that flexible though, in that the rules are specified only in configuration files—there’s no easy interface for changing them at the moment.
The system is based on administrator roles, and either grants or denies a particular administrator access to a given back-end page based on their role. It can also be used to deny access to certain tabs within each page, certain areas within each tab and even individual controls within each area. So, for example, almost all types of administrator need access to the page editing system, but you might only want your SEOs to access the SEO tab, or you might want your content editors to be able to, well, edit the content of a page, but not change its title or template.
There’s a fair bit I want to add here though, along the lines of setting up more advanced rules (the front end already has a much more capable access permission system).
Notes
The notes feature was one of the first things I ever added to Renaissance, after I’d done the basics. I just kind of felt like doing it.
It allows administrators to add notes to different content items. Notes can be of different types (to do, urgent, info, et cetera), and they can also be marked as requiring an action. If another administrator ticks off an actionable note, the original administrator gets an email telling them that that thing’s been done. Combined with the notes overview page, which all administrators can access, it provides a kind of pretty simple group to do list.
The head scratching bit
My question is, where do I go from here? What tools do other platforms provide? What do I need to add that’s incredibly useful?
I already have a few ideas (shareable check-lists, a content review system, et cetera), and I’m sure that there are plenty more ideas to be had out there. I’m also equally sure that there are plenty of things that might seem like good ideas, but that would actually be a bit of a waste of time to implement.
So, I’m looking for your thoughts? Any ideas, dos and don’ts? Any input would be very much appreciated!
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