Managing file/folder access permissions

The Folder/File Access permissions category lets you limit a group’s access to selected folders (or directories) and any subfolders they contain, as well as determine whether users can delete web pages and related files.

You can choose to limit user access to specific folders within the web site or to allow users to access all of the folders within the defined web site. To define folder access permissions:

1. In the Permission Group dialog box, select Folder/File Access from the category list on the left.
2. Select Allow users to edit files in any folder to let users access all folders and files within the web site’s root, or Only allow editing within these folders to limit access to a specific subfolder or group of subfolders.
3. If you’ve selected Only allow editing within these folders, specify folders by clicking Add Folder. The Select Folder dialog box appears.
4. The Select Folder dialog box displays all folders and files under the web site’s root. You can preview pages in the web site by selecting them with the mouse pointer. This allows you to see which pages you are restricting access to.
5. Navigate to the folder you want to provide access to and click Select Folder. For example, if the web site’s root is http://www.bu.edu/history/ and you want to specify that users only edit pages within a folder labeled news, click the news folder. The access path will appear as: http://www.bu.edu/history/news/. The Select Folder dialog box closes, and the selected folder appears in the Folder access list. You can add additional folders to the Folder access list to give users access to multiple directories within the web site.
6. Click OK.

The next time a Contribute user connects to this web site, they will be able to edit only pages and files that are inside the listed folders.

Note: To edit files on the web site, your content providers must also have write access on the web server for the specified area. You can request that we add content providers to your site via this form.

You can allow users to delete pages from the web server. When determining if users should be able to remove a page from the web site, carefully consider if you want to maintain a backup copy of deleted pages.

If you do want to maintain backup copies, you must make sure that the Contribute rollback feature is enabled. To let users delete files from the web server:

1. In the Permission Group dialog box, select Folder/File Access from the category list on the left. (See “Accessing the Permission Group dialog box” on page 168.)
2. Select Allow users to delete files they have permission to edit.
3. You can also choose to remove any rollback files associated with a page by selecting Remove rollback versions on delete. Carefully consider if you want to maintain backup copies of web pages before allowing users to delete both an active web page and any rollbacks versions of that page.
4. You can either select another permissions category to modify or click OK to apply your changes.

Tip: If a user deletes a file, but not the rollback copies of the file, the file can be resurrected using the rollback copy.