Play with MUM

In this section, we'll play a little with MUM. The first screen you will see after you go through the installation is the same you will see after you log in: the zone administration page.

Global controls

On the top right of the screen, you see the global controls for the application. In the picture below, the user is signed in as admin, and there's a Sign Out link. Right below that is the Current Zone control. Since most administration operations relate to a single zone, that zone is shown there. You can change the current zone by clicking on the arrow link right next to the zone's name:

Select the current zone by clicking on the arrow icon.

Zone administration

Each user belongs to one and only one zone. The default zone created by the installation is the "MUM Zone", and it's also the home zone of the administrator.

Zone controls

The first row of controls shows links to the administration of the current zone:

Edit this zone: edit the zone's properties
Create a new Zone: create a new zone
Delete this zone: delete the current zone, if it's empty. A zone is empty if it has no users and no groups.
List all zones: opens a new page with the list of all zones in the system.
MUM configuration: takes you back to the installation page.

The first three controls are Ajax panes. If javascript is enabled, they will open inside the same page:

User controls

The second row contains a shortcut to the user administration page (see below). Just give a user's username into the field and an auto-complete list will show up to help you. The MUM Zone only contains the admin user, but the Example Zone we created in the last section contains several users with random names:

Below that, you have two more controls:

Create a new user: creates a new user in the current zone
List all users: lists all users in this zone.

Group controls

The last row works the same, except it handles groups:

Show group: type in a group's name to go to its management page (we'll get to that).
Create a new group: creates a new group in the current zone
List all groups: lists all groups in this zone.

User administration

The user administration screen has nothing much different from the zone administration screen:

The current actions are available here:

Edit this user: edit the user's properties
Change password: change the user's password
Delete this user: delete the current user, if it's empty. A user is empty if it has no users and no groups.
Select groups: manage the user's membership to different groups

By default, user membership is not inherited. In other words, the fact that the user d_user3 belongs to Group4 says nothing about their membership to Root5 or any current or future children of Group4:

Piece of the "Select groups" screen for user d_user_3, showing its membership to Group4.

Group administration

Who has seen one management screen, has seen all of them:

The current actions are available here:

Edit this group: edit the group's properties
Delete this group: delete the current group, if it's empty. A group is empty if it has no groups and no groups.
Create a child group: create a new group as a child of this group
Manage group hierarchy: access and edit the group tree structure

We tried to leave the group administration as simple as possible to extend. One screen that is very specialized is the group hierarchy screen, which uses a Prototype-based Drag and drop mechanism. Since drag and drop is still relatively new in a web environment, we added some user help to it:

Since you can't move a group to its own child (it would cease to be a tree indeed) and moving it to its parent is redundant, these elements are greyed out when a group is dragged. Drop a group onto another group (or on the zone, which is the root of the tree) and an Ajax request will be issued to move the group.

We also show a menu when the user hovers on each group, with a link to the group's management page. This makes it very easy to create several groups and adjust the structure, something that a user administrator will probably need to do.

Feedback

This is the end of chapter one. We're looking for feedback in our blog, good and bad. The next chapter goes deep into web development with MUM.

Please send us comments, questions, criticism:

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