What is a Member Account?

A login to your website. You can give each person accessing your site their own member account, or you can give an account to a group of people. No matter what, the member accounts you set up will be given the permission of whatever audience they're placed into.

What is an Audience?

An Audience represents a view of your site to a group of your site's members. Basically, it's what you want a particular group of your friends or colleagues to be able to do on your site. An Audience is given a number of permissions on your site. After you've set up permissions for an audience, you can then create logins so that people can gain access to the site resources you've designated.

How are Audiences related to Member Accounts?

Members have accounts within Audiences. Audiences define a role (permissions), and Member Accounts are each individual's login to your site. Member Accounts may belong to one audience each.

What is an Editor? What is a regular Member?

An editor is any Member Account that is part of an Audience that can modify/contribute content to your pages and posts. Any member accounts that are not Editors are just referred to as simply Members. Your website package determines how many editors and members you can create within your site.

Note: Editors to your site do not have administration access to make structure or appearance changes.  Those settings are controlled by the owner account.

How do I add an editor to my site?

There are a few steps to setting up an editor account:

1. Create an Audience for your Editors - Audiences are groups of members on your site. From the Member Permissions tab under Members & Access, select to create a new Audience.
2. Set up permissions - After your audience has been created, go to the Member Permissions tab and select which pages you'd like these audience members to have editing privileges within by using the option sliders.
3. Add a Member Account - Finally, go back to the Member Accounts tab and select to add an account. While creating the account, select that it should be a member of the audience that was just created.

What is the difference between a limited editor and an editor?

A limited editor is a concept that applies to your Journal page only. A limited editor can create posts for your journal, but only modify posts they have created.  By default, limited editors cannot mark entries as published (they will be saved as drafts), however you can set publishing permissions to allow them to publish entries (see this screenshot).

A full editor must approve and publish posts made by a limited editor, and has access to create entries and modify page content anywhere they have editor permissions.

Note: Setting limited editor permissions for other pages besides the journal page is the same as setting the permissions to visible for that audience.

Does Squarespace support SSL access?

Yes. You can enable SSL login and security through the [Structure > Website Settings > Security] area of your website manager. As a note, the SSL feature is available with our Business and higher packages. See the pricing page here. 

How do I create a member account? Can visitors sign up automatically?

With the Pro package and higher you can manually create member accounts on your site, using the instructions for this here. Alternately, there is a Public Registration page available with the Community package, to allow visitors to create their own member accounts on your site. This is only available with the Community package, and cannot be added 'a la carte' to another site package.

If you have a Community package you can add the registration page to your site using the guide here. When you add this page you can set your audience in the page configuration -- all member accounts that sign up via this page will automatically be added to that audience.

How do I set a login redirect page?

You can configure this on a per-audience basis for member accounts on your site. Navigate to [Website Management > Members & Access > Member Permissions]. Click to edit your audience, and choose the login or logout redirect page from the drop down menu.

Note: Members will need to log in directly via a login page on your site to be directed to the page you set. See this guide for adding a login page.

Can I generate a mailing list of all members in each audience?

Yes. This is available from [Website Management > Members & Access > Member Permissions]. Click to edit your audience, and locate the button at the bottom of the page to generate a mailing list of your members -- see this screenshot for more information.

If I have a site with multiple members, how can they login using an XML-RPC client?

Members of your site can log in using an XML-RPC client by providing a username of the format "<sitename>/<USERNAME>".

Can I restrict portions of my website behind a password? How do I add an editor to my account?

You can do this by creating an Audience for your website, then creating Member Accounts within that Audience (these are the logins). The basic process is this:

1. Create an Audience — Creating an audience for your site will allow you to specify a group of users, and what those users can do and see on your site. Start in the Members & Access > Member Permissions tab of your site manager, and click to create a new audience. Give the audience a name and a description.
2. Give the Audience Permissions — After creating your audience you will specify what this audience can do/see on your website. The left hand column contains the pages of your site, and the top row contains the audiences that you've added to your site. Move the sliders in the grid to the appropriate permission levels for each audience. 
   Note: To prevent the public from viewing specific pages on your site, you'll need to set the Public Audience permissions for your pages to restricted.
3. Create one or more Logins — At this point, navigate to Member Accounts in order to create some logins that will have the permissions defined by your newly created audience. Add a login, and set this login to be in your new audience.

You're finished. Your new login will work at the login area on the front of your site, and these users will have the permissions you set up in the Audience Permissions page.

How can I subscribe to changes on my site or receive comment notifications via email?

You can create an email subscription to any page on your site by clicking your profile link in the top gray bar while logged in. In the drop-down menu, click the link to Subscribe to Page Updates. For instance, to receive notifications by email when someone comments on your Journal entries, you would navigate to your Journal page and click "Subscribe to Page Updates".  This function will also notify you of comments submitted for approval (for site owners) if you have comment moderation enabled within your site.  Note that you will not receive email updates for your own changes to subscribed pages -- you will only receive updates via email from other editors.

How can members of my site subscribe to email updates?

Email notifications for site members should be set up as follows:

1. Create a new Member Account - Each person who requires email updates should have an account within your site. You can add member accounts from within [Members & Access > Member Accounts] from within your site manager.
2. Have the Member Enable the Subscription - Once your member logs in to your site using his/her account, they can create a subscription to any page on your site by clicking their profile link in the admin bar at the top right of the screen. Under Membership Management, click Subscribe to Page Updates on the page they wish to receive updates for.

Creating a New Audience

You can create an audience for your site to define permissions for members to access your site. Instructions for creating a member account on your site are available here.

Click to read more ...

Creating a Member Account

You can create a member or editor account within your site, and assign this account to an audience. With this feature, this user will be able to log into your site with site permissions as defined by their audience.  Instructions for creating a new audience are available here.

Click to read more ...

Changing Comment Permissions

By default, any site visitor can leave comments on your site. If you'd prefer, you can change the comment settings for Journal, Guestbook, and Discussion pages.

Click to read more ...

Members resetting their password see an SSL Certificate warning, how can I prevent this?

If you're using a mapped domain on your site, members resetting their passwords will see a security certificate warning (see this FAQ entry for more information).  You can resolve this warning message by modfiying your e-mail templates to direct members to your Squarespace URL to reset their password.

From [Website Management > Structure > Website Settings > Email], choose the Password Recovery e-mail template.  Replace the existing password recovery variable:

PASSWORD_RECOVERY_LINK

by adding this new variable:

SQUARESPACE_PASSWORD_RECOVERY_LINK

This will use your Squarespace URL instead, and will eliminate the security warning.

Note: Amending your e-mail templates is a feature available with the Business package and higher.  Please excercise caution when making changes, as this can affect information added to your messages.