Sections are the highest level way to divide up types of stories, with topics allowing a little more granularity. They can be added, deleted and edited from the Sections admin tool in the admin tool box {NOTE: link to admin tools description}.
When you enter the section editor you will be confronted with a blank form. To the right of the form is a list of all of the sections on your site. When you first install, you will only have the sections 'News' and 'Diaries'. Click on the name of a section to edit it. Or if you want to create a new section, just fill out the form and click the 'Write' button.
The first input box is the Section name. This isn't what the users will see, but just what scoop will refer to the section as. Its best to use just standard alphanumerics plus underscores and dashes for this. Any more and funny business with the URLs occur.
Next is the Display Title. This is what the users will actually see, and what you'll be able to click on to edit it in the list on the right after you save.
Description is just for you. It is there so that you can keep a note to yourself about what the sections aim is. Eventually, we could make these descriptions available to the site users, if the need arises.
Lastly if you're creating a new story is the Section Icon. This is the icon that will be displayed if you put |section_icon| in a block. As of my writing this, that is not yet implemented, though it will be shortly. Click on the 'Write' box below it to save your changes.
If you're editing a current story, you will have 2 extra input areas between the above form and the section permission table below. One is a checkbox for if you want to delete the story, the other is a pull-down box. The pull-down box allows you to choose which section all of the stories posted to the section you will delete to move the now-displaced stories to.
Below this pull down box is the section permissions table.
There are four different section permissions, and they apply to each group that you define in the Group admin tool (3.12). The possible permissions are 'Post Comments', 'Read Comments', 'Post Stories', and 'Read Stories'. What they control is pretty self explanatory. Each of these make up a column in the permission table. The rows are all of the groups you have defined. Where they intersect is another drop down box.
You can choose 3 options from this drop down box: 'Allow', 'Hide', and 'Deny' (There are actually 5 for Post Stories, more on that later). These define the degree to which users will be able to know about this section. If you choose Allow, users will be able to do whatever permission their column is in, in this section. For Deny, the users will be given a short message telling them they don't have permission to do [post a comment, read a comment, post a story, read a story] in that section. Lastly if you choose Hide, Scoop will pretend that section doesn't exist. So if you ``Hide'' the Anonymous group from doing any of the above four permissions in MySection, then short of having someone tell them about it, it will appear as if that section doesn't exist.
Used ingeniously, you could have whole subgroups inside your site without separate groups knowing about each other. Fun, eh? :-)
Note that if you want a section fully hidden, you can't just link to it in a block. You have to use a box and test if they have permission to read/post to it using
$S->have_section_perm();Which is covered more within Scoop, and in the Hacking section (4). If you have any questions about using this function now, run:
$ perldoc lib/Scoop/Admin/Perms.pmto get more information about coding with section permissions.
The Post Stories column has five choices instead of three. The two extra choices are ``Auto-post Front Page'' and ``Auto-post Section''. If a group has one of these permissions for a given section, then every story they post in that section using op=submitstory (in the edit story admin tool it will get saved however you specify in the pull-down menu) gets automatically posted. It will be posted to section or front page, depending on the permission specified in the section permission table.
One thing that is a good habit to use, is to only use alphanumerics, underscores, and dashes in the Section Name (not the display title, which people will see). Also by default sections will be accessible to all users, unless you change the permissions in the permission table.
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edit_sections