Pawtucket is meant as a public presentation layer and was designed with the idea that if an item is to show up in Pawtucket, it will show up to all users. Authenticated users get more features – commenting, tagging, rating, sets – but not more access.

Each of the three values in the access drop-down in Providence has a specific effect in Pawtucket:

"Accessible to Public" means the item (object, entity, etc.) will appear in Pawtucket to all users "Not accessible to Public" means the item will never appear in Pawtucket. "Restricted public access" means the item will appear only to users coming from IP addresses specified in the privileged_networks directive in app/conf/app.conf. This feature is usually used to provide expanded access to an archive when access from particular workstations, or from within an archive/museum itself.

(Note that all of this is actually configurable and refers to the default configuration)

You can change the values in the access drop-down, and you can change which values do what in Pawtucket. You can even disable access checking in general and let everything show up, regardless of the 'access' settings. What you cannot do (right now) is restrict certain records (or images) to logged in users.

If you use HTTPAuth you'll end up locking down the entire Pawtucket install, which is not what you want, right?

It would not be a huge job to add this feature to Pawtucket. If you would want to have only certain records, or images, restricted to logged in users than you'd have to add another 'access' value and then modify the functions in app/helpers/accessHelpers.php to pass back the correct access value to check when the user is logged in.

If you want to have all records or images restricted until login then you'd still modify the access helper functions, but in a different way.

We have had some other requests for an authenticated access front-end and it is certainly on our todo list. But it's a long list... and so far all of the projects that have supported development of Pawtucket have used an open access model.

seth