All visitors to the website belong to at least one Novacaster Group. Those visitors that are not logged in are members of the 'anonymous' Group. Those visitors who are logged in are members of the 'users' Group. Members of the 'users' Group may also be members of one or more other Groups configured in the system.

All interactions between the users and the system that are possible - such as the ability to create content, or the ability to submit a reply to content, or the ability to configure an aspect of the system - are called Capabilities.

There are as many Groups in the system as you wish to define, each of which may have a different suite of Capabilities available to them. This matrix of Groups and Capabilities is called a Permissions Schema.

Once defined, a Permissions Schema may be applied to any individual piece or Category of content stored in the database, or to any other aspect of the system.

What this means in its simplest terms is that you can set up areas of the website that are only accessible to those Registered Users that you have decided to place into the Group whose Capabilities in the Permission Schema allow them to see and interact with each area.

For example, a News Category may have a Permissions Schema that allows only the members of the News Team Group to post articles, but allows every visitor to the site to read them, and also allows Registered Users to submit comments to the articles which are only visible to the News Team Feedback Group.

You can set up Registered User Forums for discussion between all Registered Users and choose to allow non-registered users to read but not post.

Alternatively, a Committee Discussion Forum could be set up that was completely invisible to all users but the members of the Committee Group. A subset of the Committee Group might also be placed into another Group, granted the additional facility of attaching files to items in the forum.

In these examples, the names of the Groups, Categories etc are entirely arbitrary and under the control of the site administrators.

Many website management systems only make the distinction between users 'logged in' and 'not logged in', and often rely on a single administrator.

Novacaster allows you to create as many Groups as are appropriate for your userbase, and to grant each one access to the Capabilities that are appropriate to them.

If you would like to discuss Novacaster, to explore how it can meet your requirements, please complete the Enquiry Form and a member of the team will contact you directly.