User Management

In Caribou, you can manage all of your users and staff right in the control panel. Here, you can do things like suspending users, editing user profiles or logins, adding new staff administrators who can access the control panel, or manage the usergroups which users can then be promoted or demoted to upon subscription/expiration.

Managing Usergroups

Usergroups work tightly with subscription packages to fulfill the subscription membership capabilities of Caribou CMS. Users must belong to at least one usergroup at any time.

Normally, administrators will create a usergroup called “Registered” that holds all basic site registrations (not necessarily subscriptions). This usergroup becomes the base level usergroup and rarely gives additional access privileges. Marking this usergroup as the “Default” user group in Users > Members & Groups will mean that all initial registers will be placed in this group.

After a user purchases a subscription, however, you may want to move them to another usergroup for subscribers only. In this case, you’ll want to create at least one more usergroup other than the default user group. Then, when adding a subscription package, mark this new subscribers-only usergroup as the usergroup to promote users to. Now, when someone subscribes, they will be placed in the usergroup automatically. Upon expiration or cancellation, they will be moved out of this usergroup.

Managing Users

You can add, edit, or suspend user accounts in the control panel at Users > Member Search. You can also perform more specific functions such as adding subscriptions to an account or viewing the user’s billing history.

To change the expiration date of a manually-recurring subscription, access the users Billing History and select “extend” beside the expiration data. Auto-recurring subscriptions do not have this feature; they have a “cancel” link which will cancel the subscription in both your Caribou system and with the payment gateway.

Users can be suspended or un-suspended at any time. Suspended users cannot login and they will be notified that their accounts have been suspended if they attempt to do so.

If you think that a user may be sharing login information with another user, you can check out the user’s Login History via Member Search in the control panel. With the aid of hostnames and login times, you can investigate the matter.

Managing Staff/Administrator Accounts

To add more individual user accounts to your control panel (useful for sharing control or when there are multiple content authors), access Users > Staff in the control panel. Staff are assigned to staff groups that have certain privileges assigned to them. Furthermore, individual staff accounts contain certain content queue privileges. These queue privileges either force all content submitted by the staff member to be placed in the Content Queue before publishing or give them permission to approve/reject content in the queue, themselves.

Staff account information is accessible in content templates. This is useful if you want to include the author’s name, email address, and/or biography with content that they have submitted. Access these variables in this manner:

Submitted by {$authorfirstname} {$authorlastname} (email me!)
/* other variables listed below: */
{$authorusername}
{$authorgroupname}