In a New Context: Publicly Viewing a Page

Here’s a simple scenario: I have created a new context (demo), and I’ve added one page to it. I want that page to publicly viewable by everyone on the front-end.

I went to Security --> Access Controls, then I right-click the anonymous user group, and I added my new demo context with the minimum role of Member and the "Load Only" access policy -- this is exactly what the "web" context has.

However, when I try to preview my page inside the demo context, I get a 404.

Am I doing something wrong? Thanks!

Yes, you need to give them more permissions than load, which simply means they are allowed to load the data and know that it exists. There is also list and, more importantly, view if you want users to be able to actually access the page from a browser.

Yeah, I tried that before I posted, but no dice. It doesn’t make sense to me why this wouldn’t copy the same access-policy that is in place for the anonymous user-group and the web context (the anonymous user-group was set to use the "Load Only" access policy for the web context by default). I’ve even tried giving the anonymous user group the Administrator policy too, but I can’t ever preview the page -- it always 404’s.

All of this is under Security --> Access Controls, then right-clicking the user-group in question for anyone who’s playing along at home.

What am I missing?

Do you need to protect that page or context in the Manager? If you remove the ACL entry, the page and context should be completely unprotected.

Also, have you tried looking from another browser? I’m not sure what context you’re in when you preview -- that could be an issue.

Yes, I’ve tried via another browser in addition to trying to preview the page from the manager, but I cannot for the life of me get this page to show up.

Do I need to protect this page? Well, yes and no.... I realize this is a simple use case, but I wanted to do the scientific method here and try keeping "everything" the same except for the context, just so I could see how I’d have to handle the permissions to re-create something similar to what I already have. I wanted to see how that worked before I created new contexts for other parts of the site, and it seems like I’m already into deep water. I have a related post:
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,56236.msg323009.html#msg323009

I answered on the other thread. I’m sure it could be done with contexts, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea.