TNG: Setting up users

Previously, we talked about Guests and Users on your TNG site, and how nice it is when they drop by.  If you want them to linger or even contribute, you need to know about Users, how to get them, to register them and to set them up with roles.

First, how do we find our users?  Go into the Administration panel and click on the Users tile.  That takes you to a page with four tabs: Search, Add New, Review and E-mail.

• Search This will list all of your current registered uses: their username and real name, role, settings and last date and time of login. If it is a long list, you can use the search box.
• Add New is where we will create accounts for any new users and set their permissions.
• Review If you have set your site to allow visitors to register for an account, then you will get registration requests and they appear on this page. When a registration is pending, the tab will have an asterisk: Review *.
• E-mail allows you to send e-mails out to all of your users, or only those assigned to a particular tree/branch combination. The email will come from the address that you set up in General Settings >> Mail and Registration.

 Adding new users

Adding a new user is straightforward.  Go to Administration >> Users >> Add New.  Then fill in the boxes, select a role for the user and then save.

• Description This is for your benefit, so you can use “Researcher in Manchester”, “Aunt Martha”, or “Rootsweb contact”. It only appears on this page that I know of.
• Username Used for logging in. Must be one word, 20 characters maxiumum.  For the Guild TNG, we use your membership number.
• Password is also one word, no spaces, 20 characters max. You can set up your new user with a temporary password but insist that they change it on their first logging in.
• Real Name is useful for you and others that connect with the user.
• The rest of the test boxes are optional, but the e-mail address is used if you are doing bulk email messages to your users.
• Tree + Person ID will allow this person to see their own living data, even if their record is on a tree or branch not assigned to them.

Roles and Rights

You can set up your users to have a progressive scale of permissions within TNG.  They can be registered to be just a Guest with no privileges, or Submitter, Contributor, Editor, Media Contributor, Media Editor, Custom or top-level all-access Administrator.

We will go into these permissions and security in the next article.  Two things to note:

• You will already have yourself and a user named “TNG team” as administration.  Please do not delete either of these.  Yourself for obvious reasons, and the TNG team, as they are there to assist should you get into difficulty.
• The other caution is to really minimize the number of users with administration power.  It is not needed by your contributing users out there.  The fewer people that have full scope of changing your site, the more secure and safe that it will be for you.