Customer Portal Accelerator's Content Management

In this brief lesson I'll describe the basic setup of the content management role in the Customer Portal Accelerator. This lesson will focus on setting up a power user that can modify the look and feel of the website by simply logging into the portal.

First things first, read the Content Management Guide located within the documentation folder. This document is found in your install files you got from CodePlex.

Setting up a Power User:
To set up a power user, go to the Content Management tab located in the main bar on the left and navigate to Web Roles.

If the Customer Portal Administrators role does not exist, you'll need to create it. Just select New, name it Customer Portal Administrators and set it to your website.

Once this is done you'll add a Contact record to the role. This Contact needs to have already registered with the website.

Now login to the website with this Contact and you'll see the various Edit buttons and WYSIWYG areas.

Troubleshooting:

If you're not seeing any of the Edit buttons, you should verify two things:

1. Make sure your web.config has this node in it:

<location path="Services/Cms.svc">

<system.web>
<authorization>
<allow roles="Customer Portal Administrators"/>
<deny users="*"/>
</authorization>
</system.web>
</location>
Notice this node has the Customer Portal Administrators role defined.
 
2. Make sure the server the website is hosted on has the WCF roles needed.
Verify:
.Net 3.0 is installed.
Windows Communication Foundation HTTP Activation is turned on.
Windows Communication Foundation Non-HTTP Activation is turned on.
 
Conclusion:
With this post you should now be able to hand off the design of the website to a webmaster or marketing user. To restrict their access simply remove them from the role and they will no longer be able to update.
My next post will deal with adding custom controls to the website to add another layer of functionality.
 
Happy Coding!