Domain administration overview

Help for domain administration: Index

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- Concepts in web-based administration
- About your Start Page

  Adding and editing user accounts
  Administering roles and permissions
  Creating and editing user groups
  Creating and editing project groups
  Approving, disapproving, or deferring projects
  Using domain administration tools
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Concepts in web-based administration

Administration of this site is web-based, enabling you as the Domain Administrator to access certain administrative web pages that are restricted to other users. Administrative options are also included in pages accessible to other users, but are only displayed to you due to your unique permissions.

Several essential concepts govern this site's administrative web pages:

- Users are individuals who have either registered with this site or had a user account created by you. Each individual user has a unique user name and password. They also play one or more given roles on the site with certain permissions. You set the operating parameters for how individual users and groups of users to interact with this site.

- User Groups are sets of users that you can create and collectively grant roles and permissions according to your organization's needs.

- Projects are collections of modules, members, and mailing lists. Each project has its own subdomain, such as http://projectname.thisdomain. When projects are created on this site, the following automatically establish:

  - a home page and supporting project pages to access hosted tools and site features
  - a dedicated issue tracking database
  - a top-level source code module for version control of project files
  - a default set of mailing lists for developers to communicate with one another and to receive notifications of project events.

- Project Groups and Categories enable easier site-wide administration of hosted projects. Project Groups contain multiple projects, and are created and administered by you according to your organization's needs. Project Groups can also contain groups of users. Categories are a unique kind of project group to provide a way for organizing all projects on the site by development type to summarize this information on all users' start pages.

- Roles and Permissions are the means by which users are able to conduct activities on this site. A unique permission governs every single user action possible; roles are pre-packaged sets of permissions granted to users. You can also assign roles to users collectively via user groups.

- Resources are all of the different elements used in this site including the tools, content, projects, and web pages. User roles and permissions on this site are defined by the specific resources they apply to.

The development environment and integrated tool set on this site is modeled around the suggest-and-approve workflow common to open source software development methodology. Although this site features "prepackaged" resources, user roles, project settings, and tool configurations as a matter of convenience, you can either use these default settings "as is" or alter them to address particular community, project, or organizational needs. Read more about how to access domain administrative features in the next section, "About your Start Page."

About your Start Page

When you log in, your view of the Start Page features an Admin Options section with direct links to administrative screens where you conduct these domain level tasks:

Administer Projects
  Displays a comprehensive, alphabetical listing of all projects hosted on this site with links to project home pages. Includes a filtering option and a link to add new projects. See Approving, deferring, and disapproving projects for further information.

Administer Users
  Displays a comprehensive, alphabetical listing of all users registered on this site with links to individual user account information. Includes a link for adding new users. See Adding and editing user accounts for further information.

Administer Roles
  Displays a screen listing all user roles available on the site, both at the domain level and within projects. Roles are sets of permissions that determine which site activities users can access. See Administering roles and permissions for further information.

Active User Sessions
  Displays a page logging currently active user sessions with login date/timestamp, last servlet accessed, and previous access date/timestamp information. This page provides a status snapshot of current, real-time site activity. See Monitoring user sesions for further information.

Project Groups and Categories
  Displays a listing of all project groups and categories on this site. Includes links to create or edit groups and categories. See Creating and editing project groups for further information.

Administer User Groups
  Displays a listing of all groups of users on this site. Includes links to create or edit user groups. See Creating and editing user groups for further information.

Administrative Audit Log
  Displays a summary log page of numerous site activities with date/time stamps and other event identifying information. Includes links to a detail page for each event. See Using administrative audit logs for further information.

Specific requests requiring your immediate attention appear in the "Pending Actions" section immediately following the administrative section.

As the Domain Administrator, you are the gatekeeper of the site, and you effectively "own" all the projects hosted here. You also own two special projects that are included in the "My projects" section of your Start Page: the "www" and "look" projects. These contain this site's domain-level content pages and data files. They are only accessible to users with domain-level administrative permissions, i.e. domain administrators such as you.

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