I am using Omeka-S version 1.10.
I want to set user permission for a site from “Admin” to “Viewer” in the expectation that the user can see their site but not edit it further (add new pages, changes existing pages),
What happens is that there is no change in the ability of the user to edit. As a “Viewer” they can still add pages, add material to them and edit existing pages.
Am I misunderstanding what means “user can see the site’s backend but cannot edit”, or is “Viewer” permission an untested feature that does not work, or been corrected in a newer version? Is the “Viewer” role for the site overwritten by the “author” role given generally to the user?
Just for the record, why I want to do this is that I am using Omeka in education. Students gather material for an exhibit in part 1, which they present as a site. I then want to freeze further editing on these sites after a deadline. Thereafter students curate a part 2 site, based on different given themes, that draws on items from all the part 1 sites. So I do not want the sand to shift under the students’ feet as they construct their second site.
They are admin when I set them up as users, but I have experimented with a dummy account that I have set to Author. Obviously, they still have to permissions to work on the second site while the first is frozen.
I am testing in their account.
I realise that Omeka-S is not specifically designed for education, but it seems to have the functionality I want. If I am reading the manual correctly, and what I want to do does not seem alien to a professional setting.
I just tested with an installation-level Editor user, set them to Admin user on a site, had them add a few pages, and then switched them to Viewer on a site. It worked - they were locked out of the site.
However, a Site Admin’s installation-level privileges are not overridden by site-level permissions.
I replicated what you did and they can still edit.
Just to be sure, I take “installation level” to mean that I should set up the user to be “Editor”, but then set the “User Permissions” on the site to be “Viewer”.
I checked that the user is the"Owner" of the site.
Perhaps we need to update over the summer and see if this is a feature of 1.10 ?
Correct - there are two places where users have permission levels set. One is when you create the user for the entire Omeka S installation - in the main dashboard, under “Users”, where the options are Global Admin, Site Admin, Editor, Reviewer, Author, and Researcher (this part of the manual: https://omeka.org/s/docs/user-manual/admin/users/)
However, because of the global-level permissions granted to Site Admin and Global Admin user roles, they have access to all sites regardless of the site-level permissions.
Edited to add - yes, I believe it makes sense to add your students as (Global) Editors, and them let them be Admins at the site level.
I have confirmed that if a user is the owner of the site, you cannot really downgrade them to a viewer. So in the cases of the sites already made, they are going to continue to be able to edit those sites.
Does it make sense in your workflow to create the sites for these student groups? That way you, or a Site Admin user, would be the ‘owner’ and you could change out the students’ roles as needed.
Many thanks for following this through. I will check on my own site. I suspect that I cannot change ownership at this point.
I cannot remember why I went to the trouble to set each site up in the users’ own logins. It may be something to do with item sets. Perhaps I don’t need to set up the site under the ownership. Indeed if they cannot delete their own site, that would be to the good. I will have to check by setting up a dummy account.
Thanks again for you efforts - I feel more educated and more confident about permissions .
Happy to have helped. There’s not currently a way to change ownership of sites from the admin dashboard - it might be possible by getting into the underlying database, but I’m not 10% sure on that.