Create a Lab Website in Brightspot

In Brightspot lab websites exist as “sections”. That means they’re treated more or less like subfolders on the department website. For example, Byron Adams’ lab website is part of the biology website at https://biology.byu.edu/adams-lab.

For the most part I recommend finding an existing website that the requesting professor likes and then copying its structure.

To create a new section, just go to Brightspot and click Create -> Section -> New from the bottom-left of the search view:

If you want it to have its own navigation click on the overrides tab, then under “header” change “Navigation” to “Select” and select or create a new page navigation object:

Give your section a name, any content you want (the section object in Brightspot defines the section’s “homepage” as well as its hierarchy). When you’re done click “Publish”. Now go ahead and create the pages. Make sure that for each page the section is set to the one you just created.

Once all the pages are created add them to the navigation for your section.

Finally, you’ll need to create a security role with edit rights for that section, then add the requesting faculty and any of their students who need access. Go to “Site Category Users and Roles”, then click on “New Site Category Role”:

Give it a name, set the site category to “Life Sciences”, the sites to “Some Sites Permission Setting” and then choose the department website. Under “Areas” choose “Dashboard” and under “UI” leave it as “All”:

Under “Encompassing Section Restrictions” choose your newly created section and click the toggle so “Restrict Content Without a Section?” is true:

Under “Specified SAML User NetIDs” put the NetIDs of the requesting professor and anyone else they specify should have edit rights on their lab website. These should be in the format “netid@byu.edu”.

That’s it! The site is now set up. Now tell the professor to look over the tutorials at https://sites.byu.edu/docs and join the User Group Channel #byu-sites on byu-web.slack.com.

- Published by Mackay Chandler, 09/09/2021