Visibility Settings Now Available

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi All,

This afternoon we made a small but very useful addition to the Site & Pages section of your networks. We've added a Visibility option to content sections on Public pages. This will let you create sections of content that are either only visible to Signed Out visitors, or only visible to Members. It means that within a Public page you can determine who can see what. Here are the options:

1) Everyone (Public) - this means that signed out visitors will see the content, even if it's coming from a Blog or Forum or Photo section that's members only.

2) All Members - this means that all your signed in members will see the content, even if it's coming from a Blog or Forum or Photo that has higher permission restrictions (like an Admin-only forum).

3) Default - this means that whatever permissions might exist on the content will still be in place. If you have an Admin-only forum and place content from it on a public page, only Admins will see it.

4) Non-Members Only - this means that anyone who isn't signed in will see the content, but members won't. This is perfect for including calls to action for visitors to join your network, and we think this is how the Visibility setting will be used most.

Here's how it looks:

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

[Henry Thomas]

I love this option, and glad Ning decided to implement it. Nevertheless, the option also need to exist in Groups. Like many of the great options that Ning is steady bringing into existence, they are leaving some of them out in the Groups (Ex. unlinked pages, hide options, activity feed). If possible, please include some of the options and others yet to come in the Groups, as som of our Networks weigh heavily on Groups.

Thanks,

Henry

P.S. Keep up the GREAT work, and keep bringing the great options!

[Patricia Koosed]

Awesome feature!

[Jeff Danos]

Hi, thanks for the group welcome. I'm a long-time Drupal developer working on my first Ning network (at least my first paid Ning network - I played with it years ago when it was free). I'm pleased to see this visibility functionality available; in fact, I don't see how you could get very far in a tiered-member environment without it. It seems obvious that the next step would be to not only allow us to set visibility settings for Public / Members / Non-Members, but also to set visibility based on custom defined User Categories, in the same way that we can decide "Who Can View" a page by User Category. This would allow for a great amount of flexibility in serving up protected/custom content within a page. Any chance that this is on the horizon?

As I mentioned, I'm new to Ning so I'm still getting the hang of the layout and management interface. I'm guessing that in the meantime, the only way to set visibility by User Category is to create individual pages (versus content boxes on a page) and set that page's "Who Can View" setting. Then, I could add a link to that page from the main menu that is also only visible to that certain user Category. Any other suggestions?

Thanks again for this service. It's nice to have a fairly intuitive interface on a CMS that doesn't require me to constantly be applying security updates that break my sites. ;)

[SweetPotato]

Welcome Jeff, your suggestions are great and have been mentioned on these boards before. If this kind of functionality isn't to appear then they could at least make member categories one of the Ning varirables so we can hang our css hats of it.

SP

[Jeff Danos]

Thanks, SP. Yeah, CSS tied to user cat variables is an option, but not for content that needs to be "protected" from lower tiered members. CSS would only hide it from screen, not from the source. :(

[Vincent Wright]

+1 

[Stephanie Sikorski]

I love that! 

I will definitely use that feature!

[Rev. O.M. Bastet]

I wish it were specified whether these changes are for Ning 3.0 only and not Ning 2.0 networks? I gather this one is, but I don't recall that minor detail being mentioned.

[Denis]

Can this new feature be used for designing a splash page / intro page / landing page for a network? I hope that's what Kos was talking about earlier.

[Kos]

Denis, no, not a real splash page but you could do things such as have a large slider at the top of your site highlighting what you have to offer with each slide.  Highlight testimonials, awards the site has earned, etc.  (draws to get them to sign up)  Then once a member signs it - *poof* it's gone.

You can "hide" advertising from signed in members if you wish.

You can "make appear" calls to action to get them to post, share, etc.