In direct contradiction to all documentation and old discussions, Contributors CAN make a collection public. This is apparently not supposed to be the case, so I can only guess this is a bug that popped up at some point. Any thoughts on fixing this? I’d love if it was a by account toggle, but by default we need it off not on.
I believe it’s not technically a “bug” but a long-standing problem with the documentation and people’s assumptions about how the permissions work. If such a restriction ever existed for Collections, it has not been the case for a very long time, back to the 1.x era.
The “makePublic” permissions and checks are currently exclusively applied to Items, as far as the core is concerned.
If you could point out the documentation that says this, I’d appreciate it, as that should be made accurate no matter what. Of course it’s also very reasonable to expect that the same permissions around publicness that apply to Items would apply to Collections, so fixing the actual “bug” also probably makes sense.
Every piece of documentation and discussion says this… Unfortunately I’m not allowed to put links in posts apparently… I’ll try to trick it…
omeka.org/codex/User_Roles
"cannot make their own items public."
omeka.org/forums-legacy/topic/adding-and-editor-user-role
"Both are derived from the Contributor role, but Authors have the additional ability to make their own items public/featured"
omeka.org/forums-legacy/topic/contributors-cannot-make-items-public
(legacy forum yes but posted only a year ago long after 2.0 was released…)
etc…
This gives the indication that this only very very recently changed.
It sounds like all the places you’re mentioning are talking about Contributors not being able to make Items public. This is indeed a permissions restriction that has existed for a while.
However, your question was about Contributor users making Collections public, not Items. Collections don’t have the same restriction.
Now that this is clarified, I can’t say I understand the logic, and this is not at all desirable. While I have not tested it directly, this would seem to indicate that if I can put items in a collection and make the collection public the items are public. If not, and either way, I still don’t want the Contributor to be able to publish anything without review, including a blank collection. This is just inconsistent behavior, they should follow the same rules. So yes, I can see how this is confusing to people, because it frankly does not make sense.
I think you’re right on this point, but I do want to offer a clarification:
That’s not the case. The “publicness” of an Item is controlled only by its own public flag. Placing the item in a collection and making that collection public doesn’t affect whether the item itself is public at all (a public viewer won’t see the non-public items, even if they’re assigned to a public collection, even if they’re viewing that collection).