USER GUIDE

Administration

Everything under the Site Admin menu: the staff who run your website, the roles that decide what each person can touch, the public accounts that sign up on your site, and the reports and security settings that keep it all tidy and safe.

Before you begin

You need a staff account to reach any of these pages. A staff account is simply a login that can sign in to the admin dashboard and manage the site — unlike a public visitor account.
Adding or editing staff, changing roles, running the Undelete tool, and opening the Security and Portal settings all require the Super Admin role. Managing public customers requires either Super Admin or the Manage Customers role.
If a page tells you a role is required, ask an existing Super Admin at your organization to grant it (see Roles & permissions below).

Wording may differ on your site. Some labels are set per site. This guide says "Staff", "Customers", and "Groups", but your dashboard may call them "Administrators", "Users", "Departments", or something else. The menu location is the same either way.

Everything below lives in the left sidebar under Left menu › Site Admin. Click Site Admin to expand it. You will see four groups: Staff, Customers, Reports / Undelete, and Settings.

1. Staff users

A staff user is a coworker who can sign in to the dashboard and help run the website. Every staff person gets their own login (their email address and a password) so you always know who made each change. What a staff person is actually allowed to do is controlled by their roles — adding the account and choosing the roles are two separate steps.

1 Open the staff list

Go to Left menu › Site Admin › Manage Staff. This shows everyone who can sign in to the dashboard, with their name, email, phone, and current roles.

Tip: from this list you can tick the box next to one or more people and send them a password-reset email — handy for a new hire or someone who is locked out.

2 Add a staff member

On the Manage Staff page, click the Add button. Fill in the new person's details — at minimum their email address, first and last name, and a starting password.

Passwords must be at least 8 characters and cannot contain the word "password". You can leave the password blank when editing an existing person; that simply means "don't change it."

Already have an account? If you enter an email that already belongs to a public customer on your site, EvoCloud upgrades that existing account to a staff account instead of creating a duplicate, and tells you so.

3 Save, then set their roles

Click Save. The new person can now sign in, but until you give them roles they can do very little. Open the person from the list again and use the Roles panel to choose what they can access. See Roles & permissions for what each role means.

4 Edit or remove a staff member

Click any name in Manage Staff to edit their details, phone numbers, or roles. To remove someone who has left, open their record and use the Delete action. Deleting deactivates the login right away; it does not erase their history, so the Activity Report still shows what they did.

5 Import many staff at once

To add a whole team in one go, use Left menu › Site Admin › Import Staff. Download the example spreadsheet first so your columns line up, fill it in, and upload it.

The example file uses these columns:

Column	What it holds
email	The person's login and email address (required).
first_name / last_name	Their name.
primary_phone_number / extension	Work phone and extension.
job_title	Their title, e.g. "IT Support".
work_fax	Fax number, if any.
street_address, city, state, zip_code, county	Mailing address fields.
newsletter_topic_add / newsletter_topic_remove	Newsletter lists to add them to or remove them from.

Note: importing creates or updates staff records, but it does not assign roles. After an import, open each new person (or use them in bulk) to set their roles.

2. Roles & permissions

Roles are how EvoCloud decides what each staff member is allowed to do. Instead of ticking dozens of individual permissions, you give a person one or more named roles, and each role unlocks a matching part of the dashboard. A person can hold several roles at once, and their access is the sum of all of them.

Who can change roles? Only a Super Admin can add or remove another staff member's roles. This keeps control of the site in a small, trusted group.

1 Assign roles to a person

Go to Left menu › Site Admin › Manage Staff, click the person, and open the Roles panel. Tick the roles they should have and save. The change takes effect the next time they load a page in the dashboard.

2 Pick the right roles

Give people the least they need to do their job. The most common roles are:

Role	What it lets the person do
Super Admin	The keys to everything — manages other staff, roles, security settings, and can edit and delete any content. Give this to as few people as possible.
Content Admin	Create, edit, and publish site content (pages, news, FAQs, forms, and more) across the whole site.
Content Contributor	Create new content and edit their own work, but their changes go into a Pending Approval queue rather than publishing straight to the live site.
Department Content Manager	Manage the content that belongs to their own group / department, and approve work within it.
Department Manager	Manage the details of their own group / department (contacts, hours, and the like).
News Manager	Manage news posts.
Event Manager	Manage the calendar and events.
Communications Officer	Manage newsletters, subscribers, and organizations.
Manage Customers	Add, edit, import, and export the public customer accounts (see the next section).
Booking Manager	Manage facility booking.
Bid/RFP Manager	Manage bids and RFPs.
Human Resources Manager	Manage the HR / job-applicant tools.
SimpleSend Admin	Administer SimpleSend™ mass notifications.
Ticket Admin / Ticket Manager / Ticket Staff	Different levels of access to Simple311™ service requests, from full control to working assigned tickets.
Bulk File Operations	Perform bulk actions in the Media Library.

Tip: your site may show a shorter or longer list depending on which apps you have enabled. If you do not see a role, the matching app may not be turned on for your site.

Go easy with Super Admin. Because it can delete content and change security settings, only give Super Admin to people who genuinely need to manage the whole site. For everyday editors, Content Admin or Content Contributor is usually the right choice.

3. Public users & organizations

Besides your staff, your site has public customers — the members of the public who create an account to subscribe to a newsletter, follow a department, get bid notices, or use the portal. These accounts cannot sign in to the admin dashboard; they are entirely separate from staff. Organizations are an optional way to group those customers together (for example, a company whose staff all subscribe to your bid notices).

Who can manage customers? A Super Admin or anyone with the Manage Customers role.

1 View and find customers

Go to Left menu › Site Admin › Manage Customers. Use the first-name, last-name, and email boxes to search. As with staff, you can tick people and send them a password-reset email.

2 Add or edit a customer

Click Add to create a customer by hand (name, email, password, address, and which newsletters or departments they follow), or click an existing person to edit them. To remove a customer, open their record and use Delete.

3 Import customers from a spreadsheet

Use Left menu › Site Admin › Import Customers to upload a list of subscribers at once. Upload your CSV file; the page reports how many records were added or updated.

4 Group customers into organizations

Go to Left menu › Site Admin › Organizations to see your organizations and their members. Click Create to add one, or click an existing organization to edit or delete it. Editing organizations requires the Communications Officer role.

4. Reports & Undelete

The Reports / Undelete group holds three tools for keeping an eye on your site and recovering from mistakes.

1 Undelete (restore deleted content)

Deleting content in EvoCloud is a soft delete — nothing is truly gone right away, so it can be brought back. Go to Left menu › Site Admin › Undelete, choose the type of item you deleted (a page, news post, alert, and so on), tick the item(s) you want back, and restore them. This requires the Super Admin role.

Tip: if you try to re-add a customer or staff member and are told the account "already exists but is currently deleted," come here to undelete the original account instead of creating a new one.

2 Activity Report

Go to Left menu › Site Admin › Activity Report to see a dated log of what your staff have changed. Set a start and end date, optionally narrow it to one staff member, and the report lists each action with the date and who did it. It is the quickest way to answer "who changed this, and when?"

3 Media Export Report

When you ask EvoCloud to bundle up your uploaded files into a downloadable ZIP, that job shows up under Left menu › Site Admin › Media Export Report. Each row shows when the export started, when it finished, its size, and a Download link once it is ready. Older exports eventually expire.

5. Settings

The Settings group holds two site-wide configuration pages. Both require the Super Admin role. (A third item, Payment Settings, is covered elsewhere and is not part of this guide.)

Security Settings

Open Left menu › Site Admin › Security Settings. This page gathers site-wide safety and housekeeping options:

Setting	What it does
Newsletter Archive Name	Which newsletter feeds the public archive page. Leave blank to turn the archive off.
Newsletter Successful Signup Redirect	The page a visitor lands on after they subscribe.
IP Addresses to Block	One address per line. Visitors from a blocked address see your block message instead of the page.
IP Address Block Message	The plain-text message shown to blocked visitors.
Disable Editor HTML Encoding	Advanced. Lets trusted authors paste raw HTML. Has real security implications — leave off unless you have been advised to turn it on.
Search Exclude File Results	Keeps uploaded files (PDFs, Word docs, etc.) out of your public site search — useful when files may contain sensitive text.

Passwords and two-factor sign-in. These are handled per person, not on the Security Settings page:

Password rules: every password must be at least 8 characters and cannot contain the word "password." Staff and customers can reset their own password from the login screen's "forgot password" link, and you can email a reset from the Manage Staff or Manage Customers lists.
Two-factor authentication (2FA): a staff member turns on 2FA for their own account from their profile page, then scans the QR code with an authenticator app (such as Google Authenticator). If someone loses their phone, a Super Admin can reset that person's 2FA from the staff member's record so they can set it up again.

Portal Settings

Open Left menu › Site Admin › Portal Settings to control the public sign-up "portal" — the pages where visitors create accounts and manage their subscriptions. Here you can:

Add a custom header, CSS, and a Login Page Message to match your branding.
Write a Welcome Screen Message and a Newsletter Topics Selection Message that greet people as they sign up.
Turn individual sign-up types on or off — newsletter subscriptions, department job-posting alerts, calendar subscriptions, and bid-category alerts — using the "Disable…" options.

Click Save Portal Settings when you are done.

Next steps

With your staff, roles, and settings in place, you are ready to build the site itself. Head back to the User Guides home to set up Pages, Menus, News, Departments & Groups, and your apps. If you assigned someone the Content Contributor role, remember their work will wait in a Pending Approval queue for a reviewer to publish.

Need a hand? Contact EvoGov support or visit help.evogov.com.