There is no single switch for Portals in your Rhythm account. You make a series of setup decisions, and each step is easier when the previous one is already in place. Use this guide as a starting map when you are setting up Portals for the first time or reviewing an existing setup.
The Recommended Order
- Set up hosting and complete first-visit setup. This puts your portal on the internet so visitors can reach it.
- Connect your domain and certificate, so members can reach your portal at the address they expect, over a secure connection.
- Create your first site. Your account starts with a member portal site, so for many associations this step is really a review of that site. If you need more than one site, such as a separate donor portal or event microsite, create those too. After you have more than one site, see Choose the Site You Are Working On to understand how Rhythm tracks which site you are editing. If you create a site for a specific member workflow, set its purpose to Member Portal. A site with that purpose and its sign-in redirects also needs its callback and logout URLs added to the identity provider application your account uses, or sign-in from that site will not finish.
- Configure site settings for each site: branding, header and footer markup, scripts and stylesheets, analytics, the default menu and error page, variables, and currency display. Site settings affect visitors as soon as you save them, with no separate publish step; see Site Settings Explained. Branding includes the site's favicon, which you set on the portal site's own settings. It is not inherited from a separate marketing or WordPress site, so changing that site's branding does not change the icon visitors see in the portal's browser tab. There is no required or recommended logo size. The portal displays the image you provide at the dimensions it already has. The sign-in area has its own branding as well: you can set the sign-in button's color and add an image above the sign-in options. If your portal shows a storefront, it shows the store named in that site's own store setting. Creating a new store in Orders & Inventory does not add it to the portal automatically, so return to this setting and enter the new store's identifier after the store exists. For event registration, decide early whether you need external analytics tags or pixels to track the full website-to-portal journey, or whether Rhythm's own registration and order reporting answers the question. For a completed registration, native reporting is usually the simpler source. Turning on analytics for a site takes more than checking a box. Plan for a short setup process, which can include finding or placing a Google Analytics component on the pages you want tracked instead of only entering a tracking ID.
- Build your shared asset library: upload the images and documents your pages need, and set up any templates and custom components your pages will use. See Working Copies, Published Versions, and the Asset Map Explained, Start a Page from a Template, and Upload and Replace a File Asset. Homepage promotional content, such as an ad for an upcoming event, is usually stored here as an asset too. That lets you swap one promotion for another from Assets without editing the page itself.
- Design and publish your pages and menus, using the assets and templates from the previous step. A page, directory, or submission space is not automatically available to visitors after you create and publish it. Visitors see it only after you add a menu item that points to it, in the menu your site uses for that area. This is true even when another process created and installed the page for you, so confirm it has a menu entry before you consider it done. If you are building a benefits or resources area with several types of content, use a landing page to explain the benefit and link to the right places. Keep grouped resources and document downloads on their own pages or components, then link to them from the landing page.
- Set up access levels and security policies to control who can see each page and menu item. See Security Policies Explained; if an integration or your support team needs to check a visitor's standing directly, see Check a Contact's Eligibility Through the Integration Interface. If you let portal visitors create organizations during sign-up, check both the account-wide signup setting and the portal form's own configuration. Turning off automatic organization creation at the account level has, in some cases, still left a portal form configured to allow it, so review the form itself if visitors can still create organizations after you disable the setting. Letting a parent organization's contact manage a child organization in the portal has been observed to depend on several things lining up: the organization relationship, your account's setting for managing child or descendant organizations, and the acting contact having a role with the right permissions. Accounts have reported different experiences with exactly which contact role setup is required, so test this with a parent, a child, and your intended contact role before you rely on it.
- Set your sign-in requirements and redirects, so protected areas ask the right things of visitors before letting them in.
- Verify end to end in your sandbox before you repeat the process in your live account. Open a preview, confirm a published page and menu appear as expected, and confirm a protected route behaves correctly on the site's own domain. View the Portal as a Member is a reliable way to check what a specific member would see without needing their password. If pages or navigation look wrong partway through testing, Rebuild a Site Map is the usual repair. If your test depends on a portal existing in your sandbox, such as a directory lookup through the member portal, and your sandbox does not have one yet, setting one up can take a separate request to Rhythm. Expect to involve support or your implementation contact rather than finding a self-service option.
Portals and microsites have no stated limit on how many people can use them at once. Requests are spread across a content delivery network and supported by components that scale automatically with demand, so a launch with hundreds of simultaneous visitors is not a meaningful load for the platform. A small test group before launch is still worthwhile, not to protect against load, but to confirm your flows and settings behave as expected.
Tip
Portals does not force you to follow this order exactly. For example, you can start building pages before your site settings are finished. The order above simply makes each later step easier because the setup it depends on already exists.
Warning
A new site has no site map until one is built by a feature installation, by this setup process reaching the point of publishing content, or through an initial rebuild. If pages do not appear on a brand-new site even though you created and published them, that is usually why; see Rebuild a Site Map.