Introduction

What's New is a popular homepage component. It displays the latest objects added to the Intranet. Such objects include Documents, Publish Pages and Forum posts.

Each What's New option has an associated code. Added together, these create binary values, which are used to define users' settings in the database.

Codes

• Documents: 32

• Publish Pages: 2

• Forums: 64

Binary values

The following binary values correspond to various example combinations:

• Documents and Forums: 96

• Documents and Publish Pages: 34

• Forums and Publish Pages: 66

• All: 98

Updating Settings For Multiple Users

There are 2 methods for updating the settings for multiple users:

Method 1 - Perform a bulk user update in the People Control Panel

Create a CSV with the following column headers defined (as minimum):

• username

• what's new

Insert users' usernames and the required What's New binary value into the correct columns. Perform the bulk user update using the 'Add/update from CSV file' facility in the People Control Panel.

You may wish to use the 'Export users' facility in the People Control Panel to extract a list of usernames. You can download the results set to a CSV file and then just add and update the what's new column.

Method 2 - Update the Claromentis database

This method should only be used by an experienced DBA

Users' settings are stored in the 'users' table. To review users' settings, run the following SQL query:

SELECT id,username,whats_new_mask FROM users;

To update all users with the same settings, run the following SQL query:

UPDATE users SET whats_new_mask=*binary_value*;

To update one user's settings, run the following SQL query:

UPDATE users SET whats_new_mask=*binary_value* WHERE id=*user_id*;

Additional

Default Value

The default settings for new users is 98 (Documents, Publish Pages and Forum posts). This default setting can be changed. Look for the following line of code in the configuration file and change the value of as required:

$cfg_default_whats_new_mask = 2+32+64;

Hiding Settings

You may wish to disable the option for users to change their own settings. The ability to change their own settings would need to be hidden in 2 areas:

• 'What's New options' tab on the My Settings page.

Look for the following lines of code in the configuration file and comment out the tabs you wish to hide:

// Show and edit this fields in mysettings.php:
// $cfg_mysettings_fields must be array of needed fields
// Default fields are listed below:
$cfg_mysettings_fields = array(
"whats_new_mask",
"notification_method",
"notify_on_checkin",
"language",
"skin",
//"codepage_settings",
);

• 'Change Settings' link on the header of the What's New component. This would require a small modification to one of the HTML files. Please contact the Claromentis Support Team for more information.