[Sigia-l] SUMMARY: Display of unavailable areas within site

[Listera]

"Jeff Lash" wrote:

> There are very few sites like this, and even so, it is difficult to see how
> they are designed because that requires setting up several different accounts
> with different levels of access (or, as I was hinting at here, finding someone
> who works "on the inside" to explain how they've done it).

This is a fairly straightforward access management issue. There are, of
course, many different approaches depending on the matrix of volume/kinds of
content, users and access levels.

Since you can't practically have an infinite number of users and infinitely
variable number of content pieces with an infinite permutation of access
policies between the two, the canonical approach (as used in network access,
for example) is to have groups. Groups define hierarchical access zones to
which both users and content are subscribed (via their respective database
records/tags); when the two match (during the request-response loop) access
is granted.

The tricky issue here is to decide whether to install access at the page or
component level. The former is relatively simple, the latter almost always
requires the pages to be dynamically generated by an app server. If the page
has six components two of which belong to a group the requesting user
doesn't have access to you'll need to decide what to do: do not render the
restricted components and reflow the page around them, render them without
clickable links/URLs, render them in a different style/color, render them
with appropriate marketing/navigational notices, embed access upgrade
facilities, etc.

Technically speaking, taking the latter approach is harder, unless you have
frameworks in place for policy checking and user tracking. Commercial
personalization apps should be able to handle this.

As far as usability is concerned, it's mostly a matter of marketing: do you
want to be upselling the user constantly? Do they need to see stuff they
don't have access to? Do you show users what kinds of stuff they have access
to and what they don't all in one location or spread throughout the site as
needed? Can they 'upgrade' on a per-item basis? Etc.

You need to nail down your marketing/navigational policies first,
implementing them at the technical level is quite straightforward even when
non-trivial.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba