Types of Installations

There seems to be two types of installations that ccHost is being used for: Mid-large scale remix communities (e.g. music, Flash (tm) games, images, etc.) and individual's content sites such as music blogs and vlogs. There are many admin features in ccHost and many of them are geared toward the community features. We will try point out where those are the case and can therefore be ignored by individual usages.

Command Structure

First and foremost is to get used to the idea that ccHost is a command based system. Commands are appended to the base URL after the "virtual root"

http://ccmixter.org/media/people

If you are using non-pretty-URLs then that command would like like:

http://ccmixter.org?ccm=/media/people

For purposes of brevity we use the 'pretty-URLs' versions from now on.

 HINT:  Substitute your installation base URL for 'ccmixter.org' in these examples.

 HINT: For a list of commands click on 'Global Settings' then 'Restrict Access.' The commands are grouped
       by categories. Click on the category to expand and see the command names.

The virtual root is 'media' the command is 'people' which displays the latest users with uploads. If the virtual is left off, 'media' is assumed. So the same command can be stated:

http://ccmixter.org/people

Most command have parameters that are appended to the URL

http://cchost.org/people/antonov

command is still 'people', parameter is 'antonov' which displays anotov's specific information.

Terminology: "tag" vs. "tag" vs. "tag"

There are several different meanings of the word tag used when administering a ccHost installation.

MP3/ID3 Tags

The title, author and other meta data associated with an ID3 compliant media file (like MP3s) are embedded directly into the media via ID3 tags.

Folksonomy Tags

These kinds of tags are used to create categories of uploads. There is a menu item Browse Tags so visitors to your site can quickly identify categories of uploads at your site.

Just to confuse things even further there are three types of folksonomy tags:

• User tags The uploader assigns these tags during the upload process and can edit them through the Edit link on the upload's main page.
• System tags These are tags controlled internally by the system, usually by file verifiers and have to do with the internal data formats (e.g. 'stereo', 'image', etc.). Neither users or admins can edit these tags directly.
• Admin tags These are tags that controlled by the admin through the use of the Manage Site/Submit Forms and Global Settings/Tags settings pages and on individual uploads through the Admin link on the upload's main page. Users can not edit these tags.

Super Admins

The main access levels are Everyone, Registered Users and Administrators.

The potentially confusing thing is that both internal commands and user interface elements (like menu items and navigator tabs) have security clearances but they have very different effects.

NOTE: Setting a security level on a menu or tab item does not restrict 
      functionality, it only affects the visibility of the menu or tab item.

In other words, you may have a menu item that invokes the editorial/picks command and mark the menu item as Administrators Only but that will only hide the menu item from everyone but Administrators, it would not prevent someone from entering that command into their browser directly and seeing the results of the command because that command happens to be registered integrally for Everyone. In order to change the access to the actual command use admin/access command.

Also note that the access permissions on commands only determine whether the code for that command is initially invoked. The code itself may determine even stricter criteria for the command.

In other words, a command might be marked as for Registered users only (e.g. editorial/submit/{upload_id}) but the code that implements that command may have further restrictions (only allows 'editors' to do the actual submit).

There is also an implied 'ownership' built into the code for upload and user records. That means a command marked Registered users only like files/delete/{upload_id} is further restricted by who 'owns' the upload, that is: who uploaded the thing.

From Global Settings you can assign a small group of users 'super access' which overrides normal admin privileges.

You can use the admin/access command to determine which commands in the system are restricted to this group and this group only.

Where ccHost Looks for Files

Administrators have full control over where ccHost looks for files and writes logs and temporary files during the course of building a page.

The installation program created a directory structure with a name you specified under your root installation that you should, but are not obliged to, use for your customizing your site.

The Global Settings/Paths configuration screen gives you full control of where and how ccHost looks for files.