Site-specific users

Overview

In the enterprise environment, you often are tasked to manage and create content for multiple sites. In such cases, it is practical to divide the site management into different teams.  

This facilitates you in your process to align with regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, which mandate that a minimal amount of people should have access to customer information. It also simplifies the organization structure and facilitates your everyday tasks by enabling you to access and manage only the sites relevant to your goals. Such isolation prevents one team to access or delete the information belonging to another team.

For example, you can have different product groups in the same company that take care of separate product sites; or you can have a company with franchise or dealership network where each licensee or dealer has own site.

Sitefinity CMS enables you to organize and assign access to different sites using User groups.
User groups allow you to group different user accounts and let them log into, manage, or change the content only to a group of sites that are relevant to them. User groups govern what sites a particular user account can work with, while the permissions govern which resources are available within these sites.

Default Sitefinity CMS configuration

By default, the user groups are disabled, and all user accounts can interact with all sites. Thus, administrators can log in every site’s backend, modify, or delete them. Content editors can access information or modify content on all sites unless their permissions explicitly deny this.

Membership providers

To manage the user accounts and implement authentication Sitefinity CMS uses the provider model. The most used provider is the built-in one, which stores the authentication data in the database. User groups are implemented by using membership providers. The Default user group has one such provider, and each additional group that you create uses a separate provider. The user groups that you assign to your sites behave like other shared providers, such as News or Libraries.

For more information, see Provider model, Authentication, and Users.

Local and global administrators

When user groups are enabled, you have two types of administrators - local and global. The local administrators are administrators of one particular user group and all the sites that this group belongs to, while the global administrators are administrators of the entire Sitefinity CMS instance.

IMPORTANT: User groups are not a strictly security bounded. If for example, a site uses two user groups, the administrators that belong to one of the groups can create other administrator accounts in the other user groups that the site uses. If one such group is the Default group, she can create an administrator account with full access to your entire Sitefinity CMS backend. To avoid this, use only one user group per site.

Local administrators

When an account is designated as an administrator of a specific user group, it is limited in comparison to the global administrator account and can manage only the sites and associated resources that belong to this specific user group.
  • Local administrators can log into and manage only the sites that use the user group to which their account belongs.
  • If local administrators can access multiple sites, they can use the site selector in the top-left corner, but Manage sites and Settings links are not available.
  • Local administrators have access only to the Page templates page in the Design section.
  • Local administrators have access only to the following configurations in the Settings section:
    • Users 
      They can manage only the user accounts that belong to their user group.
    • Site shield
      Only if the site shield is enabled by a global administrator for the entire Sitefinity CMS instance.
    • Translations
    • Alternative publishing
    • Sitemap
  • Local administrators can manage only the following Basic settings:
    • Time zone
    • System email templates
  • Local administrators can manage only Advanced settings that have been configured to have per-site values. 
    For more information, see Site-specific settings.
  • Local administrators have access only to the Personalization page of the Marketing section.

Global administrators

When you use a global administrator account, Sitefinity CMS behaves the same, regardless whether the User groups feature is turned on or off. 

The only difference is when you are a global administrator and access a basic or advanced setting, which is available per-site. These settings have dropdown boxes next to their names where you can select which user group they apply to. 

NOTE: You can choose to override the setting, which is configured by a local administrator, and set it to a specific value per site, or remove the per-site value and let the setting use the value shared among all sites.

User groups and shared content

Local administrators should not be able to edit page templates and form templates that are shared across sites. 

You should not allow shared content to be edited by local users.

EXAMPLE: You have two sites, Site A and Site B, which share a content provider, such as a shared image library. Using User groups, you set up some backend users to have access to only Site A and other backend users to have access to only Site B. In this case, by default, users of site A can modify the content of the shared library and thus affect the content of Site B.

There are the following approaches to avoid this scenario:

  • Set proper permissions to the shared libraries so that the limited users have only read-only access and let only the global users modify the library content. For more information, see Permissions for libraries.
  • Organize your user groups and content sources in such ways that the sites have the same user groups and shared content sources.

Limitations

Authentication with separate User groups is not working when your site has subfolders
For example, yoursite.com/eu and yoursite.com/us. For more information see Create sites.
To avoid this scenario, you can:

  • Expose your sites as subdomains, such as eu.example.com and us.example.com.
    For more information, see 
  • Expose your sites not as subfolders, but as different sites, such as yoursite-eu.com and yoursite-us.com.

Increase your Sitefinity skills by signing up for our free trainings. Get Sitefinity-certified at Progress Education Community to boost your credentials.

Get started with Integration Hub | Sitefinity Cloud | Sitefinity SaaS

This free lesson teaches administrators, marketers, and other business professionals how to use the Integration hub service to create automated workflows between Sitefinity and other business systems.

Web Security for Sitefinity Administrators

This free lesson teaches administrators the basics about protecting yor Sitefinity instance and its sites from external threats. Configure HTTPS, SSL, allow lists for trusted sites, and cookie security, among others.

Foundations of Sitefinity ASP.NET Core Development

The free on-demand video course teaches developers how to use Sitefinity .NET Core and leverage its decoupled architecture and new way of coding against the platform.

Was this article helpful?