Thursday, 14 January 2010 16:24
Once you have understood the whole access system with the groups, permissions and access levels, then you have mastered the most complex chapter of Projectfork. So let's get started slowly and step by step.

Actions and their conditions

Every button and everything you can do in Projectfork is an action. For example when you click on "Projects", or "Tasks", or when you want to create a new topic in the message board...that's called an action.
To perform an action, certain conditions must be fulfilled by the user who wants to perform it. Otherwise access will be denied. Each action has up to 4 conditions that must be fulfilled by the user:
  • Group permission condition
  • Score condition
  • Flag condition
  • Special condition

Groups and access levels

In order to fulfill the conditions of an action, we have groups and access levels. Every user is automatically in a global group and has a global access level. More on that later. Let's take a look on what groups and access levels do: To fulfill the first condition "Group permission condition", the user must be in a group which allows him to perform the action.  To fulfill the second and third condition ("Score" and "Flag"), the user must have the appropriate access level which gives the user a score which is equal or higher than the action requires. It also has to give the user the required flag. Flags are used to identify a special user. There are two flags: "Project Administrator" and "System Administrator". Project Administrators are usually founders of a project and have administrative access to their project. System Administrators are like Super Administrators in Joomla and have access to all projects and actions, ignoring the the first two conditions (group, score) of an action.

Global groups and access levels

Every user starts off with a global group and a global access level, providing basic permissions in Projectfork. You can see and edit the global groups by going to Projectfork -> Groups (make sure you have no workspace selected!). The global access levels can be found in Projectfork -> Users -> Access levels (make sure you have no workspace selected!). Your starting global group and access level depends on the Joomla group you are in. For example if you are a registered user, you are automatically in the global group "Registered group" and have the global access level "Registered user".

Custom project groups and access levels

You can expand the basic permissions of a user per project, giving the members of your project access to more features.  To create a custom group for your project, select your project as workspace and go to Projectfork -> Groups -> New. Now select the permissions you want to give and add any members of your project. You can also create custom access levels for your project. To do so, select your project as workspace and navigate to Projectfork -> Users -> Access levels -> New. To assign a custom access level to one of your project members, go to Projectfork -> Users -> Edit user.

Changing the conditions

To make things even more flexible, you can change the conditions of each action by nagivating to Projectfork -> Config -> Sections. Here you can edit each Section and it's actions. A word of warning: If the special access condition is set to "Must be in workspace", leave it that way. Otherwise the function might not work properly.
More in this category: « Modular system