In Plinkit, two factors control who can see which content. These factors are a person’s user role and the publishing state of each piece of Plinkit content.

User roles are associated with login names and determine what type of actions users can perform and what type of content they can view when they are logged in. All users have the same viewing rights when they are not logged in to Plinkit.

Because you are a designated Plinkit Editor for your library, the login name and password you received have been assigned to the Editor user role. Your Plinkit Administrator may also have provided you with additional login names for your library staff members. These login names are assigned to the staff user role.

Public users, such as your library patrons, do not initially receive user login names, so they do not, technically, have assigned user roles. Nonetheless, for simplicity we refer to them as public users. When they are not logged in, Editors and staff users have the same privileges as public users.

Editor users have full rights to add, modify, and delete content in any area of their Plinkit sites. In most cases, you (as your library’s Plinkit Editor) should be the only person assigned to the Editor role, and all modifications to your site should be made using the login name that was provided to you by your Plinkit Administrator.

Staff users usually do not have any editing rights by default, although you can ask your Plinkit Administrator to assign them limited editing rights (for example, to the Staff Area) if necessary.

In addition to limiting what actions users can perform, user roles function in tandem with publishing states to control which content each user can view. In fact, it is difficult to define user roles without making reference to publishing states, or vice versa. As we saw in Getting Started with Plinkit, the two publishing states you will encounter most often are public draft and published. Plinkit items that are in the public draft state can only be viewed by users who are logged in and who have been assigned an Editor or staff user role. Items that have a publishing status of published can be viewed by all users, whether they are logged in or not.

New items are always created in the public draft state. Your patrons will not be able to view a newly created Plinkit item until you have changed the publishing state to published. There are two basic methods for changing the state of a content item.

•       You can change the publishing state of a single item using the drop-down state menu that opens when you click the item’s state on the green menu bar. This is the method that was used in the examples in Getting Started with Plinkit.

•       You can use the check boxes and the change state button on the contents tab to change the publishing state of one or more items in one operation. (The items must be contained in the same folder.)

Regardless of which method you use, select publish to change the state of an item from public draft to published. To change an item’s state from published back to public draft, select retract.

The table below summarizes the privileges of the three major user types you will encounter.

Whenever you are logged in, you will see content and features that are not available when you are not logged in. These features are shaded green to remind you that they are not visible to public users.

The screen shot below highlights some of the key differences between what a public user (a user who is not logged in) sees and what a logged-in Editor user sees.

The tabs and menus on the green bar above the main content area allow you to edit, add, publish, and delete content (see Tabs and Menus for Editors). In the navigation portlet, items that are not available to the public, such as the Staff Area folder, are also shown in green. Below the navigation portlet, a recent changes portlet lists the most recent changes made to your Plinkit site.

The (Zoom In) button allows you to display the main content area in full-screen mode, which can make it easier for you to see and edit more content without scrolling.

The screen shot below illustrates what a staff user sees immediately after logging in.

Because staff users do not have editing rights, only the view tab is visible on the green bar. The Staff Area link in the navigation portlet appears in green because it is not available to public users. Notice that although staff users cannot edit the site themselves, they can view a list of recent changes have been made to the site.