Collaboration settings

2020-12-01

As explained in the previous blog post, Boomla has landed support for a collaborative storage area called the Dynamic Filesystem. This post explains how to enable using it.

On your Control Panel, you will find two new sections.

 

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The Users section allows you to manage users that are registered on your website. You can invite users, approve/deny registration requests, kick and ban users.

The Website settings section allows you to enable collaboration. Let me elaborate on the three settings.

 

 

Website Settings

Workflow

The Static Workflow is the only one we had until recently. It allows you to create static websites: websites that only you can modify.

The Collaborative Workflow allows you to go beyond that. It allows your website to store data during visitor sessions. Switching to this workflow will allow collaboration on the master branch of your website (say, example.com) but the structure of your website will be read-only. You will only be able to edit it on a secondary branch (say, beta.example.com).

This is primarily to keep working with your website simple. That way, undo/redo will continue to work as expected while editing the structure of your website on secondary branches. The flip side is that undo/redo will not be available on the master branch. That way, if you make a change, you will be protected from undoing an action of another visitor.

For more details, please read the previous blog post detailing this.

 

Dynamic Filesystem write access

This setting defines who can collaborate. The important options are registered users vs all visitors.

 

Registration approval

This section defines how users can register on your website. Open means they can register and start using the website without your approval. Approve means they can initiate registration but you will have to approve it. Invite only means they can only sign up if you have first invited them.

This last option is not yet fully supported as the invite functionality is not fully functional. The invite link you will find in the Users section will count as a user-initiated registration and you will still need to approve it.

 

The first truly collaborative webapp

The first truly collaborative webapp is already in use: a shopping list app that is in private beta. Drop me a line if you want to test-drive it.

 


Cheers,

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