Securing certain portions of your website using mojoPortal

This is something that I get asked a lot by clients, so figured I’d pop a short and snappy tutorial up on how to do it.

Here’s the scenario:

Can we create an area for each of our clients where we can upload their private PDFs / documents ready for them to sign in and download?

You sure can, and the process can be broken down into a few simple steps:

1. Create a relevant user role for the client to be a part of (this could be your client’s company name)
2. Create a specific user account that will sit inside that role (this could be you client’s personal name)
3. Create a page relevant to the client and the client only, then restrict access to this page
4. Add content to the client’s page ready for them to grab

Let’s have a go – you’ll need to sign in to your site now:

Step 1. Creating a relevant user role within mojoPortal

What it does:

This acts as a security measure. You can create roles within mojoPortal and then allow people within these roles access to certain items / places within your website. If you have a client called “John’s Widgets” with different members of staff, you could create a “John’s Widgets” role and then add their IT manager, their web designer and their HR person into that one role; giving each member of staff within that role access to their company’s section on your site.

How to do it:

1. Click “Administration” in the toolbar at the bottom
2. Click “Role Administration” from the menu that will appear
3. Type your client name into the text box you see
4. Click “Add New Role“

Step 2. Creating a personal user account for the staff at your client’s company

What it does:

This creates a personal user account for the staff member requiring access to your website. It allows you to create a username, password and input their email address and a password reset question. Once the person has a unique account on your website, we then add them to the role that we created in the previous step.

We can rinse and repeat this for as many staff members require access to your website from your client’s company.

How to do it:

1. Click “Administration” in the toolbar at the bottom
2. Hit “Add New User” and fill in the relevant details
3. You’ll now be presented with more in depth options, choose “Role Membership” from the menu that appears above the user’s details
4. Choose the role you created in step 1 from the dropdown list and click “Add user to this role“
5. You don’t need to, but just to be sure, click “Update User“

Step 3. Creating a page relevant to the client’s company and then restrict access to them only

What it does:

This is where you will place all of the information ready for the client to download. It’s a simple case of creating a standard mojoPortal page, with one important extra: granting access to the client only. This will stop general visitors to the site seeing the client’s page. In fact, should a general site visitor stumble across the page, they’ll be asked to log in.

Don’t worry, you as an administrator will be able to get to the page too.

How to do it:

1. Click “New Page” in the toolbar at the bottom
2. Enter a relevant page name (the client’s company name works well) into “Page Name“
3. Take note of the URL that mojoPortal assigns to it (in the case of my example: “~/johns-widgets.aspx“)
4. I always un-check “Include In Menu” and “Include In Site Map“
5. Click on “Security” in the menu above the page name.
6. Uncheck “All Users” and check “Your Client Name (Johns Widgets in the example)” and “Administrators” (strictly speaking, you may not need to check the latter, but I always do just in case)
7. Click “Create New Page“

Happy new page!

Step 4. Add the client’s personal content to their new page

What it does:

This is just like working with any other mojoPortal page in that we’re simply adding content to the page. The big difference here of course is that the page is locked down so that only users within our client’s specific role can see the page and thus, they are the only people who can access the content of the page.

How to do it:

1. Click “Add/Remove Features On This Page” in the link menu above where you typed in the page name
2. Simply choose what kind of content module you would like to add to the page from the list at the top of this section, give the content module a name and choose which column the content should sit in using the dropdown
3. Click “Create New Content” and your content module will be added to your page in the column you chose
4. Repeat actions 2 and 3 for each type of content module you wish to use
5. Click “View This Page” just above where you’re working to be taken to the new page where you can edit wording etc using the standard “Edit” button.

Note: I’d typically recommend adding a HTML content module that will contain some introductory text, followed by a Shared Files module that you can use to securely use to upload sensitive data.

Giving Your Client Access

All that’s left to do now is send your client their own unique link to their new client area. Remember that URL we remembered from our new page? Well, that’s exactly what we need right now.

Your new client area link will be as follows:

• http://www.yourwebsite.com/your-client-name.aspx

Or in our example:

• http://www.yourwebsite.com/johns-widgets.aspx

Once the client heads to that URL, they’ll be asked to sign in and redirected to their own personal page once they have done so successfully.

Have I Missed Anything?

If so, give me a shout and have fun playing around!