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Feature Guides

Sites and Settings

If you have administrative rights to a website, you should have access to the Sites and Settings area. Access it by clicking the menu button at the top left of any screen and opening the Admin area. From here you can control most site-wide settings.

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There are a LOT of settings here, so this article won't cover all of them, but will hit on the most used items.

Brightspot Sites and Settings Documentation
Site Setup Tutorial Video

Sidebar

To the left of the Sites and Settings screen is a sidebar that lets you create a new site, search for your sites, lists out all of the sites you have access to, and has a few other settings.

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New Site

Creating a new site is covered in the video tutorial on this site. The best way to get a new site is to fill out the request form linked below. The new site will come with a basic header, footer, home page, and search page, as well as all of the necessary default configurations.

Order a New Brightspot Site

Main Tab

Site 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 your 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).

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.

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URLs

URLs are the most important setting in this tab. This is where you define how people will access your site. There are two types of URLs that you'll likely see 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, you see that the live URLs are expected to use brightspottraining.byu.edu, and the Brightspot URLs are set as brightspottraining.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 brightspottraining.byu.edu were set up correctly, navigating there in a browser would take me to the home page of the site. But clicking on a link to a page with an address of /demo would lead to brightspottraining.prod.brigham-young.psdops.com/demo because that is the URL in position 1.

A Brightspot URL will be available as soon as you add it 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 and non-secure version of the Brightspot URL (https and http)— 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.

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

Site Category, HTTP Authentication, Site Copy

Site Category organizes your site into a site group, which allows administrators to support many sites and users related to a particular area.

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).

Allow Site Copy? does what it says, in that it allows a site to be copied and used as a starter for another site. (Note 02 Mar 2021: The site copy feature currently has some bugs and has been turned off while the Brightspot team works on it. No ETA for completion.)

Additional Settings

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

  • 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.
  • Brightcove is a video storage and delivery service. This setting is currently only used by Continuing Education, who have a contract with Brightcove.
  • 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.
  • Directory Ingestion allows a site to import faculty and staff information from BYU databases. See Directories feature article.
  • Events allows a site administrator to set up the site's events API. This is used on the BYU Calendar site (see BYU Calendar API Documentation). Any site can publish a similar events API, and it is necessary to enable this to use the Brightspot sidebar calendar widget.
  • Preview settings will likely not be used.
  • RSS Feeds configures the site import data through an RSS feed. This should not be confused with publishing an RSS feed from a site.
  • Search has one setting, which is probably not relevant.
  • Shared Content specifies which other BYU Brightspot sites can push content to this site. It specifies 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.
  • Slack configures a connection between Brightspot and Slack, so notifications can be sent there.
  • 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.
  • Style Groups - "Some content types, such as pages, sections, and tags, use modules to lay out and format text. You can configure style groups to predefine settings and styles associated with a theme's modules. For example, you can predefine a module's text or background color, guaranteeing a consistent appearance across multiple assets in a site." (From the Brightspot guide page, Configuring a Style Group)
  • 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.
  • YouTube configures a channel ID to restrict video retrievals. Since most videos are added directly to Brightspot you probably won't use this setting.
  • 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.
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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.

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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).

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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.

Theme for most sites is set to Frost ReadyMade, which is Brightspot's customized BYU theme.

Additional Front-End Settings

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  • Action Bar (or share bar) configures a set of links for sharing articles. See Brightspot Action Bar documentation.
  • Ads configures the use of advertisements on the site.
  • 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).
  • Facebook Settings configure 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 configures 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.
  • 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

  • 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 allows 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.
  • Custom Response Headers configures custom HTTP headers that should be returned for certain pages. For example, if I wanted to add the HTTP header X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett, I 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.

Page Defaults Tab

Page defaults specify a default header, footer, site title, search page, and other site-wide settings. For a demonstration of these setting 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.
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    • Logo should not change in most cases. It's set globally as the BYU monogram.
    • Hat just makes me laugh. I like to imaging my website in a sombrero.
    • 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.
    • 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.
  • Aside/Below sets global content to the side or below the main content of pages. Aside or 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.
  • 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 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 a period of time.
  • Person Settings configures the display of employees, authors, and other person content types in Brightspot.
    • Employee promo description fields configures 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 configures default setting 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.

SEO tab

The setting here allows you to turn off the default Search Engine Oprimization (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.

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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 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.

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Related Training

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How to Show/Hide "Photo by"

Add or remove the credit text in photos.
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Questions & Answers

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Q&A

How do I setup Google Analytics for my site?

September 29, 2022 04:41 PM
To setup Analytics you will first need to create a Google Analytics account, and then link that account to Brightspot.
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Q&A

How do I Setup CAPTCHA on my Brightspot Form?

September 29, 2022 03:43 PM
Setting up CATPCHA in Brightspot involves two steps. Firstly, setting up a Google ReCAPTCHA account. Secondly, linking that account to Brightspot.
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