Each week, our Vice President of Product shares an email with the company that’s filled with the background story on why Brightspot’s features are the way they are. It’s not just how Brightspot works but why its features were engineered the way they were. Not one to keep secrets, we’re sharing her insights with you here, in a weekly column called “The Whys.” From creating vanity URLs to knowing the difference between a document and an attachment, these posts answer the questions anyone who publishes digital content has likely pondered.
We’re nearing the end of our exploration of Brightspot’s dashboard widgets, having already covered the Workstreams Widget (the one that saves time by allowing teams to work together on multiple assets without the fear of wasted and risky overlap); the Upload Widget (the one that helps you easily add multiple images, videos, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, audio files and more); and the Activity Widget (the one that offers a customizable overview into all of the publishing activity that’s going on around your site).
In today’s post, we’ll highlight the Resources Widget. This dashboard widget is precisely what it sounds like: a collection of Resources.
Your Resources can include:
- Resource File: This is a file that you upload in Brightspot, which then appears in the widget as a link that CMS users can download directly. You can upload a PDF, a Word Doc, an Excel doc, a video (.mov), etc. Examples of files commonly stored include things like brand or editorial style guides and CMS production guides.
- Resource Link: Think of this external link as a dashboard-level shortcut to something your team uses frequently. Maybe your team creates a lot of data visualizations in an external tool; you can add a link to that tool and have it be part of your dashboard. You can also control whether Resource Links open in the same browser window or not. (I always recommend having these links open in new tabs, so that you don’t mistakenly close out of Brightspot.)
Like many widgets in Brightspot, the Resources Widget can be configured at a number of levels, including globally and on a per-site and per-dashboard level. To configure Resources, look in Admin > Sites & Settings > Global (or Site) > Dashboard > Resources.
Let’s next review how the settings work, because the Resources that display will vary based on how you configure your settings, giving you ultimate flexibility.
The Rules
Resources: Global
Any Resources set globally will appear on the global dashboard, as well as on all of your site dashboards.
Resources: Site-Specific
Any Resources set on a specific site will appear on that specific site dashboard. (These will also replace the globally-set Resources, so if you want your global Resources plus a site-specific Resource, you'll need to add both in the site.)
Resources: Dashboard-Specific
You also have the option to customize the Resources links that display on a specific shared dashboard. Let's say you’re creating a shared dashboard for a specific role. If you wanted that role to have the global or site Resources, you would simply add the Resources Widget to that dashboard and leave it blank—which tells it to inherit the existing settings. If you want this dashboard to show something completely different for this role-specific dashboard, you can create your own set of Resources links within this dashboard.
That’s a wrap on the Resources Widget. We’ll cover one more of Brightspot’s dashboard widgets in our next edition of The Whys.
