Sites and Settings

The Sites and Settings area is only available to those who have the "Site-admin" permission role type for a website. Access it by clicking the hamburger menu button at the top left of any screen and opening the Admin area. The Sites and Settings page contains most site-wide settings.

There are a lot of settings here, so this article won't cover all of them but will hit on the most used items. The button below points to the comprehensive sites and settings documentation from Brightspot Vendor.

Brightspot Sites and Settings Documentation

New Site

The Brightspot Operations support team creates new websites upon request. To order a new site, fill out the site creation request form linked on the homepage of this website. The new site will come with a basic header, footer, home page, and search page, as well as all of the necessary default configurations. Once the website has been created, an email will be sent from websites@byu.edu to notify the person who submitted the form or the maintainer of the website. When a website is ready to go live to the public, fill out the website launch form linked also on the homepage to launch the website.

Order a New Brightspot Site

Sidebar

To the left of the Sites and Settings screen is a sidebar that lists out all of the sites a site admin has access to, and has a few other settings. It allows a site admin to search for a specific site as well.

Main Tab

Hierarchy Group is the collection of sites that a particular site belongs to. When you grant permissions to people, you can give them access to all sites in a hierarchy group rather than provisioning each site. Hierarchy groups can have parents and children, so, for example, a college hierarchy group can contain all of the department groups. This means anyone with access to the college group will also have access to all of the sites in the department groups. This enables easier site support all the way up the university hierarchy. You can change the group that your site belongs to by changing the group listed in this dropdown. The Brightspot support team can view lists of sites in each group, edit hierarchy group names, and change group parents and children.

Name is the name that will appear as a link in the sidebar on the Sites and Settings page, and at the top of the editor screens. It will only be visible to site editors. It's important to name the site so that it will be clear to editors. If there is a common acronym used for the organization, it can be helpful to include that in the site name because it makes it easier to search. For example, the Administrative Advisory Council site has a site name of Administrative Advisory Council (AAC).

SEO Display Name allows you to set a postfix for your site's page titles as they appear in search results and in browser tabs. For example, if you set the SEO Display Name to "BYU Website" and navigate in your browser to a page titled "About" in your web browser, the browser tab will display "About - BYU Website" as the title. Even more important, this is the title your page will have in Google search results (as well as other search engines). The SEO Display Name helps you add a site title to each page title in your site, making your pages easier to identify in search results and easier for machines (such as search engines) to understand what your page is about.

URLs

URLs are the most important setting in this tab. This is where site admins define how people will access the site. Two types of URLs can be seen here: Brightspot test site URLs and live site URLs.

Brightspot test URLs always follow the format [prefix].prod.brigham-young.psdops.com. These URLs do not need to have any relation to their live site URL, but they often do. In the example above, the live URLs are expected to use sites.byu.edu, and the Brightspot URLs are set as sites.prod.brigham-young.psdops.com.

The URL at the top of the list will be the basis for all links on a website. Any number of URLs can be added to this list, and if they're configured correctly they will lead to the home page of the site. But any link on the site will always use the URL in position 1. For example, if sites.byu.edu were set up correctly, navigating there in a browser would take a viewer to the home page of the site. But clicking on a link to a page with an address of /demo would lead to sites.byu.edu/demo because that is the URL in position 1.

A Brightspot URL will be available as soon as it is added to the site settings. Live URLs require extra configuration by Brightspot before they will work (see Site Publishing article).

When a new site is created, it will usually have four URLs, as shown above: a secure (https) and non-secure (http) version of the Brightspot URL — with the secure version at the top; and a secure and non-secure version of the expected live URL. This does not technically need to be added until the actual site launch, but it's convenient to add it as soon as it is known. All Brightspot pages are always secured (https), but including the non-secure URLs allows Brightspot to redirect them to the secure version of the site. It's important to have the secured (https) version of the URL at position 1 in the URL list.

(See also Brightspot documentation: Site URLs.)

Basic HTTP Authentication adds one or more allowed username/password pairs that are required before someone can view the site. This is often used on pre-launch sites with sensitive data. While Brightspot URLs are not indexed by Google and so will not likely be found, anyone with the URL could access those pages. This is a simple way to prevent that. To be clear, this is not CAS—this is only a username and password that you specify. If desired, you can set up CAS authentication on your site either before or after launch (see Access Restriction article).

Theme sets the site's visual theme and should almost never be modified (it can break the visual display of your entire site). Contact the Brightspot support team with questions or for help with themes.

Additional Settings

The settings below this point all appear in dropdowns and may be less-used than the ones above.

• DAM allows setting this site as a Digital Asset Manager site instead of a regular website. This is a major change and should not usually be used.
• DAM Asset Expiration Settings are not visible unless DAM is enabled.
• DAM Asset Request Approval Settings are not visible unless DAM is enabled.
• DAM Asset Share Settings are not visible unless DAM is enabled.
• DAM Asset Update Notification Settings are not visible unless DAM is enabled.
• Directory Ingestion enables import of BYU employees and specifies which employee profiles should be imported into this site. See Directory and Employees.
• Events settings are used to set up a machine-readable feed of events and event categories on this site. Event API feeds are available in XML or JSON. For further information, see the BYU Calendar API documentation and the video training Set Up a Site for Events. It is necessary to enable this to use the Brightspot sidebar calendar widget.
• Mailchimp settings allow the site to import Mailchimp newsletters as content to display. The BYU Y News archive is created through this process.
• RSS Feeds configures the site to import data through an RSS feed. This should not be confused with publishing an RSS feed from a site.
• Search
• Shared Content specifies which other BYU Brightspot sites can push content to this site. Pushed content is different from Accessible content. Accessible content comes from a site that has been explicitly set to share all of its content with this site (see the Advanced section of the CMS tab). Pushed content is a specific item that has been shared with this site This section allows an administrator to specify the type of content as well as the method for updating (manual vs automatic). See more ways to share between sites in the Content Sharing feature article.

Copy Data Tab

This tab is not visible on every site and indicates that a site was copied from another site. It just gives details about when the site copy was done, who initiated it, and what site was copied from.

Front-End Tab

This tab has settings that relate to how a site will display to users.

• Site Group should always be set to either BYU Provo or BYU Hawaii. Since each school uses a different setup for single sign-on, this must be set in order for site login to be enabled.
• Locale sets the default language for the site and defaults to US English.
• Time Zone sets the time zone of a site, which is important for displaying events correctly or for publish scheduling.
  

• Default Date Time Format configures how dates and times are displayed on the site and in the site editor interface. It is set by default to an American standard format.
• Favicon is the small icon that appears in a browser tab. The image at right is used for most BYU Brightspot sites.
• Images Downloadable By Default? configures which images are easily downloadable from the site. This doesn't necessarily prevent all downloads—someone with a little bit of expertise can download any image on your site. But it does provide a download link if you want to make images easily available to site visitors.
• Home Header Links (Max. 2) allows a site administrator to add important buttons in the header of the site. This might be used for something like a Donate link.
• Download Terms Of Use Link configures a location where people can download a site's Terms of Use.
• Default Promo Image defines a fallback image that can be used in a promo when no other image is available for a piece of content.
• Hide "X Min Read" from all Promos? configures whether a reading time estimate should appear on promos. This is available for articles, as shown below. It does not appear on other content types.
• Hide Section From Promo Default List Style? configures whether the name of an item's section appears above its title in the default promo style, as seen below (the blue Intellect link).

• Hide Events that are Finished from List Modules (e.g. Tag Pages)? configures whether past events should appear in lists. This should usually be turned on.
• Require Event Confirmation? probably only applies to the BYU Calendar site. If turned on, users need to confirm that their event has been approved before it is published.
• Dynamic List Module Cache Seconds is the number of seconds a dynamic list can hold on to previous data before you want it to update. Dynamic lists on pages show content based on parameters you've set. When you add, remove, or change content (such as publishing an article) how long can the page wait before it is updated?

Additional Front-End Settings

• Action Bar (or share bar) configures a set of links for sharing articles. See Brightspot Action Bar documentation.
• AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a standard for delivering content to mobile devices that increases load speeds by leaving out some non-essential parts of a page (mostly code that is not needed by a mobile device). AMP can be turned on and configured to increase site speed. See Brightspot AMP documentation.
• Authentication configures the setup for users to sign in to the site. This is necessary to configure if the site or parts of the site should be restricted to certain users or if a sign-in button should be enabled on the site for any other reason. See the Access Restriction feature article.
• Error configures what a user should see when the site encounters errors. It is common to create a page for 404 (not found) and 500 (internal server error) and configure here when those should appear. You may also want to configure 401 (unauthorized), 403 (forbidden) or other error codes (see HTTP Status Codes Wikipedia article). Or you can configure pages to handle entire error status categories (4xx or 5xx). You can add as many error handlers as needed, and Brightspot will use the first in the list that applies to a particular error (so you can have a couple of specifically defined error pages first, with some more general error pages later in the list to handle other error cases). (See also Brightspot Documentation: Configuring error responses.)
• Facebook configures a connection to a Facebook application and Facebook Instant Articles. See Brightspot documentation on Facebook Apps and Facebook Instant Articles.
• Form CAPTCHA connects a Google reCAPTCHA v2 service so that forms on the site can use a CAPTCHA to validate users and reduce spam submissions.
• Google DFP (DoubleClick for Publishers) configures advertising. You'll probably never use it for a BYU site.
• Integrations configure certain preset site plugins from particular vendors. These integrations are Com Score, Facebook, Google AdSense, Google Analytics, Google DFP, Google Scrolling Analytics, and Google Video Analytics. This is mostly used to add Google Analytics tracking to a site.
• Open Graph is a set of standards that allow easier sharing of content on social media. Brightspot uses OG tags to make your site show up the way you want it to on Facebook, for example. You can set a default image for social sharing here.
• PureChat is software for live chat, and it's used by the BYU home page. If you have a subscription to PureChat you can enter the script here.
• Push Notifications can be enabled here. There's not much info on the Brightspot documentation site, but if you know how to set up push notifications in other settings it looks like there are a lot of controls here.
• RSS Settings configure the default RSS publishing of Brightspot publishing. By default, Brightspot automatically publishes RSS feeds of items in sections, tags, and dynamic lists on pages or homepages. Access the feed by adding .rss to the end of a Brightspot URL. See Brightspot RSS documentation.
• SEO allows an administrator to modify entries to the robots.txt file, which web crawlers use to get information about what sites to index. This is done to prevent web-crawlers (such as Google's search algorithms) from accessing specific information on the website. The default robots.txt file is User-agent: *; Crawl-Delay: 10. More information on how Google handles robots.txt files can be found here.
• Sitemap Settings configure the type of sitemap to create and the URL where it should be found. Sitemaps allow search engines to more efficiently index content on a site.
• Social allows administrators to add account usernames for popular social services.
• Video configures default settings for videos shown on the site.
• Advanced - see below.

Advanced Front-end Settings

• Conditional Request Settings
• Web App Manifest is necessary to create a Progressive Web App, or PWA (see Mozilla PWA article). The manifest "provides information about a web application in a JSON text file, necessary for the web app to be downloaded and be presented to the user similarly to a native app" (Mozilla web app manifest article).
• Browser Config configures a browser configuration file, which "can be used to define pinned site customizations, such as tile backgrounds, badge updates, and tile notifications" ( Microsoft browser configuration schema reference).
• Custom Scripts And Styles allow administrators to add CSS or Javascript that will apply to some or all pages in a site. These can be specific to a content type or to a URL pattern. See Adding Customization and CSS feature article. (See also Brightspot documentation: Working with custom elements.)
• Custom Response Headers configure custom HTTP headers that should be returned for certain pages. For example, if you wanted to add the HTTP header X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett, you could add that here. This setting is useful for configuring cross-site scripting-allowed domains or other headers that you probably don't need to worry about unless you know what you're doing with them. (See also Brightspot documentation: Working with response headers.)
• Strip Query String From Directory Redirects?

Integrations Tab

• Analytics controls some of the internal Brightspot analytics. These are quite basic, and the suggestion from Brightspot is to connect Google Analytics (Sites and Settings > Front End > Integrations) rather than rely on the built-in analytics. See Brightspot Analytics documentation. Detailed steps on how to set up Google Analytics on Brightspot can be found in this article.
• Brightcove is a video storage and delivery service. This setting is currently only used by Continuing Education, who have a contract with Brightcove.
• YouTube configures a channel ID to restrict video retrievals. Since most videos are added directly to Brightspot you probably won't use this setting.

CMS Tab

CMS Logo sets a logo that will appear in the top left of the editor screens. It will only be visible to editors. The default setting is the BYU monogram logo.

Preview URL should always be set to the secure version of the Brightspot URL.

Site Category is a standard Brightspot setting, which has been replaced by Hierarchy Group in our instance (see the Main tab).

Additional Settings

• Broadcast is not currently used at BYU. See Brightspot Broadcast documentation.
• Dashboard configures the editor dashboard for a particular site. The default dashboard is configured globally but can be overridden here. See Dashboards feature article.
• Localization
• Preview settings will likely not be used.
• Site Copier: Allow Site Copy? does what it says, in that it allows a site to be copied and used as a starter for another site.
• Social Publishing configures the content types on which the Social Publish widget should appear. This appears by default on most types, so you'll probably never need to use this setting.
• Translation configures the languages, translation services, and content types that can be translated on your site. Our instance is not configured to connect to any translation services, so all translation is manual right now. See more in the Translation feature article.
• UI allows you to configure settings related to the editor interface. Most are self-explanatory. Pre- and post-publish actions allow you to automatically perform certain actions before or after content is published.
• Advanced configures a CSS class to be added to the site. It also sets Accessible sites. This does not refer to web accessibility for disabilities, but to which sites' content is able to be accessed by this site. In the example below, this site allows content from BYU News and BYU Calendar to appear mixed with site content. This is most commonly used to pull in news articles from BYU news that are relevant to a department or college. But this setting can be used to pull in many types of content from any BYU Brightspot site.
  

Page Defaults Tab

Page defaults specify a default header, footer, site title, search page, and other site-wide settings. For a demonstration of these settings see the How to Create and Configure a New Site tutorial video. These can be overridden in the Overrides tab of many content types.

• Image Enhancement allows you to the image credit prefix ("photo by") or hide image credits entirely.
• Authorization configures who is allowed (or authorized) to see content on the site. See the Access Restriction feature article.
• Header configures the site title, search, sign-in, navigation, and other items that appear at the top of every page.
  

  

  • Logo should not change in most cases. It's set globally as the BYU monogram.
  • Hat adds a banner at the top of every page. (See also Brightspot documentation: Creating a hat.)
  • Navigation Title or site title is the title of the site that is visible at the top of every page. It's most often set to Select > Text Title > Set: > [Site title]. The Link should almost always point to the site's home page. Breadcrumbs are links above the title. These are used to link back to a parent organization. A department site will usually have the name of its college here, linking to the college home page. Subtitle adds smaller text below the site title.
  • Navigation is the list of navigation links that appear in the header navigation bar. Brightspot expects a Page Navigation item here. A convention is to name it Header Navigation. If this is the case, then the setting here would be Select > Header Navigation. (See also Brightspot documentation: Creating a navigation.)
  • Sign In Enabled turns on CAS authentication for the site and adds a Sign-in link in the header. Set it to Override and toggle the switch on to enable sign-in.
  • Custom Button configures a button in the header next to the sign-in area.
  • Transparent Header configures the site to have a semi-transparent header with an image behind it. This should only be used by administrators who are skilled in visual design. Otherwise, your site probably won't look very good.
  • Site Lead Background Image is the image that should appear behind a transparent header.
  • Search Page sets the default site search page. Referencing a Site Search or a Google Custom Search Page here enables the Search bar in the header.
• Footer sets the website footer and privacy policy. The footer field expects a Site Footer item, which is often called "Page Footer". If it is set this way the setting is Select > Page Footer. The privacy policy is set globally to the BYU privacy policy and usually does not need to be changed here. (See also Brightspot documentation: Creating a footer.)
• Aside/Below sets global content to the side or below the main content of pages. Aside or the sidebar is a good place for navigation (a link list). Below puts content below the main content but above the footer on every page.
• Action Bar sets the ability to add pages in a site to a user-customized favorites list. This setting adds an 'Add to Favorites' button. (See also Brightspot documentation: Creating an action bar.)
• Video configures a default playlist.
• Contact Form Settings allows an administrator to hide employees' email addresses and instead show site visitors a contact form to direct messages to employees listed in the directory. See the Directory and Employees feature article.
• Digital Signage configures how often your digital signage pages should check Brightspot for changes and refresh the content. Brightspot Digital Signage pages are pages within Brightspot that are built to be shown on screens, like what you might have in the hallway of a building. When you make changes to the Digital Signage item, the page will be updated automatically after some time.
• Person Settings configures the display of employees, authors, and other person content types in Brightspot.
  
  • Employee promo description fields configure what fields display in employee directory lists that use the Vertical Photo list module.
  • Athlete and Coach Promo Description Fields only apply to sites that use these content types, and allow the same control as the employee promo description fields.
  • Show Vertical Photo sets the style for individual employee pages. By default the employee photo is round, but that can be overridden here.
  • Show Promo Description
• Permission configures whether people can edit their own employee pages.
• Type Specific Overrides configure default settings for particular content types. These override the default settings specified in other areas on this tab, but they apply only to particular pages. Overrides include Aside/Below, Authorization, Header, Footer, and Action Bar. (See also Brightspot documentation: Applying type-specific overrides.)

SEO tab

The setting here allows you to turn off the default Search Engine Optimization (SEO) recommendations for pages on the site. The image below shows the contents of the SEO tab for a particular page. This tab gives recommendations for metadata and content updates that will make a page more visible to search engines, especially when optimizing for a particular word or phrase. See the Search feature article.

Content Discovery Tab

CMS configures what BYU Brightspot sites are allowed to show promos for content on this site. If no sites are listed, any BYU Brightspot site may add this site to their Accessible Sites list in Main Tab > Advanced. There's usually no reason to set restrictions here.

Front End configures which sites' content should appear in lists on this site. An empty list retains default behavior based on the Accessible Sites list in Main Tab > Advanced. If anything is added to this list, make sure to also add the current site, or lists on this site will not include content from this site.