Concepts

Portal hosting gives your association a web address of its own, secured with a certificate, and a dedicated web distribution that answers on your domain names over a secure connection.

What happens after you save a hosting request, how to ask Rhythm to redeploy your portal after a settings change, and why a failed build looks the same as one that is still in progress.

What happens between a visitor typing your portal's domain name and seeing a page — how Rhythm finds your site, loads its settings and pages, and what it tells search engines about your portal.

What a page and a menu are on your portal site, why visitors never see a change until you publish it, and what publishing does to an image you pasted directly into a page's design.

When a page or menu item carries more than one security policy, the portal can require a visitor to meet all of them, any one of them, or none of them.

Every portal page is public, requires sign-in, or requires sign-in with a linked contact record.

After a member signs in, the portal checks that they have a linked, active contact record, a verified email, and a completed profile before showing pages about their own records.

A security policy is a named rule, built from eligibility criteria and optional event rules, that decides who may see a restricted page or menu item and what they are told if they cannot.

Site settings are the one set of choices — branding, markup, scripts, analytics, defaults, and currency — that apply to every page of a single site, and they reach visitors the moment you save, with no separate publish step.

A site is one member-facing web site your association runs on its own domain, with a single purpose such as a member portal, a donor portal, or an event microsite; every page, menu, setting, and installed feature belongs to exactly one site.

An asset moves from a working copy only staff see to a numbered published version your sites actually load; each published version keeps its own address, and an asset map tells your sites which version is current.