The Sections Admin Tool is where you edit sections and their associated subsections and section permissions. To use this Admin Tool, you must have the edit_sections perm (A.12.16) active for your group.
The top third of the page is taken up with a list of sections and a section detail form. When you click on a section from the list of sections on the right, its details are filled in in the form.
If you are editing an existing section, an additional few options are shown, used if you are deleting the section. The ``Delete this Section?'' checkbox, if checked, will cause the section to be deleted when you save it. If you also select the ``Recursively'' checkbox, all subsections (see A.9.3) will also be deleted. When deleting a section, you must choose a section to hold all the stories in the deleted section from the drop-down box just below.
The ``Update Section'' button down at the bottom updates everything on the page.
The middle third of the page is the section permission table.
The ``Make Default Section Permissions'' checkbox allows you to set the current section's permission scheme as the default for newly created sections, so you don't have to change them all by hand.
The table itself has one row for each user group, and one column for each type of section permission.
``Post Stories'' has five options: ``Allow'', which allows members of the group to post stories to the queue in this section, the default behaviour; ``Hide'', which doesn't admit to the group that the section exists when they are posting a story to the queue; ``Deny'', which admits the section exists when they are posting a story, but tells the group they don't have permission to post to that section; ``Auto-post Front Page'', which allows a member of the group to skip the voting queue entirely and post any story listed in that section to the front page; and ``Auto-post to Section'', which allows a member of the group to skip the voting queue entirely and post any story listed in that section to the section page, but not the front page.
The remaining three columns have three options each: Allow, Hide, and Deny. ``Allow'' is the default behaviour, and does not restrict the user's activity any more than the group permissions do. ``Hide'' causes Scoop to pretend that the item doesn't exist at all, while ``Deny'' causes Scoop to deny permission while admitting that the item exists.
Subsections can allow a simple heirarchical structure for the sections on your site, if one `level' of sections isn't adequate. Subsections can also do much stranger things, such as allow you to file one story in several sections.
Below the section permissions table, a list of all parent sections is displayed. If there are no parent sections, ``Top Level'' is shown; if there are, the ``path'' to the current section is shown, with the names of the parent sections links to edit that section. Below that, a table containing any child sections is shown if there are any, again with the names of the child sections as links to edit that section, and a drop-down box containing any section names that are not already marked as a parent or child section.
You cannot directly add a parent section. Instead, you must go to the parent section and add a child; the parent section is automatically updated from this information.
Sections can have multiple child sections, just as directories can have multiple subdirectories. For a simple heirarchical structure, this is all you will need. Sections can also have multiple parent sections, which tends to be rather confusing at first.
The simplest case is a heirarchical structure, where each section has one parent and however many children as seems appropriate. Each story is displayed in its particular section and on the front page as appropriate. The only real difference between this case and the normal `flat' structure in which subsections aren't used at all is that Scoop can generate links to the parent sections when in a child section's index page.
Child sections have two properties that make more complicated structures possible. As mentioned above, a child section can have two parents (or, two sections can claim the same section as their child). The ``inheritable'' property found in the table of child sections when editing a parent section allows stories filed in the child section to also appear in the parent section's index listing. (This is the reverse of normal inheritance, in which the child gets whatever the parent has.) Combined with a child section having two or more parents, a single story can be effectively filed in multiple sections.
The ``invisible'' property makes the name of the child section disappear from the generated heirarchy when viewing its children's index pages. If you write a dynamic menu/submenu for your site's sections, you can test this property and not display invisible subsections in the menu structure. Invisible subsections are primarily used when they are also inheritable to more than one parent section and you don't want them to show in a menu structure.