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This is the place to find documentation on all aspects of Elgg. If you would like to contribute your own documentation please do; we want this to be a real community effort!
Access controls
From Elgg Documentation
Access controls are one of the most important aspects of Elgg. This feature allows you to control exactly who has access to your content.
[edit] The basics
When you create any item of content in Elgg - be it a profile item, file upload, weblog post, etc - it has an access level associated with it. By default, the available options are:
- Public - anyone can see your item
- Logged in users - only logged in members of the system can see your item
- Private - only you can see your item
When you join a community, it will be added to these options. Thereafter, when you create or edit content, you can restrict it only to members of that community. Note that doing so does not automatically place that object in the community.
[edit] Creating and maintaining custom access controls
You can easily create new access controls containing exactly the people you want to see items of content. For example, let's say you have a working group, the Steering Committee, with three members, Alex, Bernice and Claire, who you want to share items with - but you don't want anyone else to see them.
- Make sure you've marked Alex, Bernice and Claire as friends. For information about how to do this, see the Your Network overview.
- Click on the Your Network menu item on the main toolbar.
- Click on the access controls submenu item.
- Halfway down the page, you'll see a Create a new group form. This is just an easy-to-remember name for your new access control. As the workin group is called the Steering Committee, that's a pretty sensible name to use. Type it in, and click Create.
- You've created a new access control - but it's empty. You'll see your access control represented on the screen with two lists of people; the one on the left is all your friends who aren't in the access control, and the one on the right is members of the access control.
- Select the access control members - in this case Alex, Bernice and Claire - on the left (you may need to hold down the Ctrl key as you click), and then click Add selected to group. You can either do this all at once or one at a time.
- Click on Your Blog or Your Files and add some content to the system. You'll see that under the access controls pull-down menu, Steering committee (or your access control's name) has been added as an option. From now on, whenever you select that access control, only the members - Alex, Bernice and Claire (as well as yourself) - will be able to see that content.
If you want to delete users from an access control:
- Click back to the access controls submenu item under Your Network.
- Find the access control you want to edit, and highlight the people you want to remove from the list on the right.
- Click remove selected from group.
To remove a group, just click Delete this group next to the access control's name.
You can have as many access controls as you wish, each with as many or as few people as you wish.
