CMS user permissions & audit trail
TLE websites support multiple user roles, with most clients opting to implement the following three:
- Author: A user who can add content within the existing site hierarchy, but who cannot approve that content for publication to the live website.
- Editor: A user who, in addition to the role of author, can approve their own content and that of other authors for publication to the live website.
- Administrator: A user who can enable and disable accounts for other users, amend the website hierarchy and generally oversee authoring and editing activity on the website.
User permissions can be applied on a highly granular basis, so a user might have editorial permissions within one sub-section of the website, but only have authoring permissions in another.
An audit trail of content management activity is maintained and can be accessed by site administrators.
Site structuring
TLE websites are created by selecting an appropriate page type from a list of available page types. Standard page types include typical web pages, interactive forms, events calendars, quizzes and so on.
An intuitive text-editing tool can be used to create content within the chosen page type, or alternatively, text can be inserted into web pages via cut & paste from MS-Word. Upon saving the page, the text is formatted to be consistent with the overall website style.
Publication and expiry dates can be set for approved sections, sub-sections and pages within the website, enabling them to appear on the live website at a future date and time and to cease publication at a later date and time. The pages are not lost from the system upon expiry but may be viewed by administrators prior to deletion, archival or reinstatement as appropriate.
A history of page versions is maintained by the system. This means that you can revert to an earlier version of any undeleted page. So, if you needed to update pages on a seasonal basis, at the end of summer, you could revert to the version of the page as it stood in the previous autumn.
Workflow
An author can develop a page and save it as "work in progress" until it is complete. Upon completion, the author submits the page for approval and an email is automatically generated to the editor of that section of the website, providing the editor with a link to the page that is awaiting their approval. In addition to notifying editors when pages have been submitted for their approval, the workflow module notifies:
- Authors who have not submitted a saved page for approval for over 24 hours.
- Authors who have pages expiring in fewer than 48 hours.
- Authors who have had pages declined by editors.
The workflow module does not inundate email inboxes; emails are sent quarter-hourly only if something concerning the recipient has occurred in the past 15 minutes and each event is only notified to the user once in any day. A daily emailed report provides a summary of all outstanding actions.
Internal link checker
A system process runs each night which checks the validity of internal links throughout the system. Broken links are disabled and reported via the daily emailed report.
Asset management
Items which enrich page content (images, downloadable documents, audio and video files etc) are uploaded to the TLE Asset Library; authors can then use or link to these assets within their pages.
TLE’s Asset Uploader allows users to re-size high resolution images for website use at the point of upload. Users can also tag ("categorise") assets, making it possible for example, to provide a site visitor with the ability to search upon a structured document library, or for page authors to build automated lists of links within a web page (see "Page and Asset Tagging" below).
If an asset is updated, it can be replaced in the Asset Library and every page that utilises that asset will automatically use the updated version.
Page & asset tagging (categorisation)
Within the public sector environment, there are published standards for the categorisation of content and TLE can implement your website to comply with these standards. In the non-public sector environment, there are benefits to be derived from the tagging of content for specific purposes.
For example, in the "Job Vacancies" section of your site, within each page that describes an opportunity, you may wish to record information such as its location, whether it is full or part-time, temporary or permanent, the hours of work and the salary band. It would then be feasible for website visitors to perform a search across all opportunities to determine which opportunities were of interest them.
Or consider an example where a website contains a large volume of downloadable PDF documents. At the point of upload, these documents could be tagged with information such as date of publication, topic(s) addressed, author, intended audience and so forth. This could deliver two benefits:
- Website visitors could be allowed to search for documents as per the job vacancies example above.
- Website authors could pre-configure their pages to show links to any document published after a certain date, authored by a particular individual and relevant to a specific topic. As new documents were added to the system and tagged, documents matching the pre-configured criteria would automatically appear as links within the page without the need for any further intervention by the author. This is what we term a Self-Maintaining Links List.
Tagging can be applied wherever it is relevant in the site and multiple different classes of tagging (as per the job vacancies and document examples above) can be implemented within a single website.
