The most important part of Tiki administration is understanding the permission system used by Tiki. Basically the rules are:

• Administrators can create and edit groups.
• Users can be assigned to one or several groups.
• Permissions are assigned to groups, NOT users.

There are two pre-defined groups:

• Anonymous : Users that are not logged automatically belong to the anonymous group.
• Registered group: Users logged in automatically belong to this group.

Tiki has the option to allow users to register themselves using the application or not, so registered users can or can't be trusted depending on that setting.

Note: When changing permissions you must refresh the page to see the updated permission list.

User administration

The user administration screen allows you to administer users. You can create new users (useful if users can't register themselves), remove users and assign groups to a particular user. You can find users by login name using the find button at the top of the listing (it will act as a filter).

Group administration

The group administration screen is similar.

Make sure you click create group! The interface is deceptive, you may in fact just be editing the same group over and over again.

You can create groups, delete groups, find groups by name/description, and you can assign permissions to a particular group by clicking assign_perms in the row of the group. Note that by default the Registered and Anonymous groups are predefined.

Including groups in groups

Note that when you create a group you can indicate that the new group includes other groups. If you do so then the new group will "inherit" the permissions from included groups (but they won't be displayed) so you can extend a group by including it and adding some permissions.

You can have a hierarchy of groups where descendant groups always inherit their parents' permissions. Sites with a structure similar to
Anonymous -> Registered -> Paid -> VIP

Or something like that can use this feature to quickly define the group's permissions.

Assigning users to groups.

Create a group, for example test, and create a user, for example foo. Then from the user administration screen click assign_groups for the user. You will be able to assign groups to that particular user. A user can belong to as many groups as you want.

Assigning permissions to groups.

From the group administration screen click on assign_perms for a particular group and you will see a screen divided in two parts. The first one shows information about the group and assigned permissions while the second part can be used to manage permissions per category. We ll explain each part next.

In this section you can see information for the group that you selected as name, description and permissions assigned.

Then you can create a new permission level and you can if you want assign all the permissions in some level to the group. Or remove all the permissions in some level from this group. As you can see permissions are organized in levels. By default Tiki comes with four prearranged levels that you can modify as you want:

• Basic: permisions for anonymous users, basic site usage
• Registered: permissions for logged users
• Editor: Permissions to site editors can manipulate content.
• Admin: Permissions for admins only. Can be dangerous if missused

In the second part of the screen you can assign permissions and change levels.

The top section is used to select a permission category, for example games, forums, faqs,etc. All can be used to see all the permissions at once (the screen will be VERY long). For each category for which permissions will be displayed the checkboxes indicate if the permission is assigned to the group or not. You can assign/remove permissions using the checkboxes; you can also change the level of any permission using the dropdown. In this way you can re-classify the permissions as you need and then easily assign all level-x permissions to a group whenever you want.

When a user belongs to more than one group the permissions are accumulated.

Permissions

Permissions are what groups CAN do. Note that permissions always ALLOW groups to do things; there are no restrctive permissions in Tiki because they can conflict if the user belongs to more than one group. The list of permissions that you can assign to groups are:

General permissions

Wiki permissions

File galleries permissions

Comment permissions

Blog permissions

Image gallery permissions

Forums permissions

Communications permissions

Games permissions

Quiz permissions

Articles & Submissions permissions

FAQ permissions

User permissions

Chat permissions

Content template permissions

Shout box permissions

Drawing permissions

HTML page permissions

Tracker permissions

Survey permissions

Webmail permissions

Newsletter permissions

User message permissions

DSNs

Permissions are created dynamically. See the Wiki SQL plugin for information

Directory permissions

Galaxia Workflow

Charts

ExtWikis

missing permissions here

Live Support

Calendar

Permissions for individual users

What if you want to give a specific user some permissions? Just create an artificial group, assign the user to that group and give the group the permissions that you need.

Individual permissions

As we explained you can set up individual permissions for some Tiki objects. When assigning individual permissions the permissions you can assign are the same as you have in the global permissions screen. Once an object has individual permissions only the individual permissions apply to the object, and not the global permissions.

The following objects accept individual permissions:

• Wiki pages
• Image galleries
• File galleries
• Forums
• Weblogs
• Newsletters
• Surveys
• Quizzes
• Trackers