Planio Support (english)

# Make Redmine Projects Public on Planio

Planio is powered by Redmine and as such it offers the same great possibilities to **make Redmine projects public** on the Internet. You can choose whether your projects should be accessible to anyone – without the need to login, including search engines – or whether you'd like visitors to sign up first and leave their email address. You can also choose to manually confirm signups or confirm them automatically by sending an activation link in an email.

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## What are Public Projects used for?

Making your projects public is a great way to provide a **help desk for your customers**. Allow them to view FAQs or tutorial guides in the wiki ([like we do at Planio](https://support.plan.io/projects/planio-support-en)) or let them sign up to discuss in forums or create issues.

Public projects in Planio are also great for collaboration on **Open Source projects**, for instance. You could also use it to host **public [Git or Subversion](https://plan.io/subversion-hosting-and-git-hosting/) Repositories**.

Sounds fun? Follow this guide to learn how it's done.

## How to Make a Project Public?

A public project on on your Planio powered Redmine account is essentially that: **An open project that is available to the public**.

Normally, only the explicitly named members of a project in Planio can access it and outsiders cannot see what's going on.

Let's change that! Here's how:

1.  Find your project or create a new one

2.  Navigating to **Settings** -\> **Information** in your project

3.  Check the box next to the **Public** label and click **Save**

{{figure(Make Projects Public on Redmine by Planio)

!make_redmine_project_public@2x.png!

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Congratulations! You now have a public project.

### Optional: Make all Projects Public by Default

Would you like to make all projects public by default? No problem:

1.  Navigate to *your avatar* -\> **Administration** -\> **Settings** -\> **Projects**

2.  Check **New projects are public by default**

3.  Click **Save**

### Optional: Allow Anonymous Access From the Web

Public projects are open to all users in your Planio account. But you can take this a step further and allow access to people who have not even logged in. This will public your public projects on the Web, making your content accessible to anyone and also allow search engines to index it.

Here's how:

1.  Navigate to *your avatar* -\> **Administration** -\> **Settings** -\> **Authentication**

2.  Uncheck **Authentication required**

3.  Click **Save**

{{figure(Uncheck "Authentication required" to allow anyone in)

!allow_anonymous_access_from_the_web@2x.png!

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Be careful though with this option. You should not have any secrets in your public projects now – the whole World will be able to see them!

Next, we'll learn how exactly these changes impact your projects and who will be able to see and do what exactly.

## The Non-Member & Anonymous Roles

Now that you've made your project public, let's see how this changes the access permissions to it.

Please navigate to *your avatar* -\> **Administration** -\> **Roles and Permissions** for a moment. You'll see two special roles in addition to [your own individual roles](https://plan.io/roles-and-permissions/) which you can define yourself:

{{figure(Non-Member and Anonymous Roles)

!non-member_and_anonymous_roles_in_redmine@2x.png!

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### The **Non-Member** Role

Click on the **Non-Member** role to pull up its permissions. What you configure here will govern what **any user in your Planio account** will be allowed to see and do in your **public projects**.

Specifically, this means that you won't have to add users to this public project anymore to give them access to it. Any user who does not have a specific role in the project automatically gets the permissions set in the **Non-Member** role. Users who *are members* in a public project will have all permissions from both the **Non-Member** role and their explicit membership roles combined.

{{figure(Permissions of the Non-Member role)

!permissions_of_non-member_role@2x.png!

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### The **Anonymous** Role

The **Anonymous** role is only relevant to you if you unchecked the **Authentication required** checkbox above. Similar to how the **Non-Member** role defines what logged in users can see or do, the **Anonymous** role specifies what anonymous users – who are not even logged in – can see or do.

We generally recommend to only give **view** permissions to the Anonymous role. Commenting or even creating content should only be done by logged in users.

We'll learn how to ask users to register for an account in a minute. Read on!

### Individually Adding Anonymous and Non-Members to Projects

If using the **Anonymous** and **Non-Member** roles isn't specific enough for your use case and if you would like anonymous users or non-members to have different permissions in different projects, you can also add **Anonymous** and **Non-Member** as if they were real users – using the regular roles.

Let's take a look:

1.  Go to your public project

2.  Navigate to **Settings** -\> **Members**

3.  Click on **New member**

{{figure(Add non-member users as if they were staff)

!individually_adding_anonymous_and_non-members_to_projects@2x.png!

}}

You'll find **Anonymous** and **Non-Member** among the list of regular users and groups. Now, you could add your **Non-Member** role with a role of *Staff* for instance. The result would be that non-members will be able to see and do exactly the same as normal members with a role of *Staff*.

It's quite advanced, we agree. In most cases it will be sufficient to configure your **Non-Member** and **Anonymous** roles' permissions.

## User Self-Registration

Earlier we said that it's recommended to only allow **view** permissions to anonymous users – you most probably don't want to end up receiving spam comments on your Planio and don't even know who posted them!

In this section, we'll show you how anonymous users can register for an account on your Planio using their email address.

### Activation Options

Let's set some settings first. Please navigate to *your avatar* -\> **Administration** -\> **Settings** -\> **Authentication**. You'll be presented with a screen like this:

{{figure(Defining options for self-registration and activation)

!allow_self-registration@2x.png!

}}

Let's take a look at the options for the **Self-registration** setting:

  - **Account activation by email** will allow anonymous users to sign up using their email address. They will receive an email with an activation link. Once they've clicked it, they will be active users in your Planio account.

  - **Manual account activation** will also allow sign ups but instead of sending activation emails, it will notify all administrators in your Planio account and you will have to activate the new users manually before they can login.

  - **Automatic account activation** will allow anyone to sign up for a new account. New user accounts will be active immediately without any activation checks via email or by an admin.

  - **Disabled** means that new users in your Planio account have to be added by admins – this is the default.

We recommend to use **account activation by email** or **manual account activation** depending on your personal preference.

Once registered, your new users won't have project memberships yet, so make sure to configure your **Non-Member** role. For example, you could allow anonymous users to view blog posts and non-member users to comment on them.

### Conversion Optimization

Once **self-registration** is enabled on your account, anonymous users will find a menu item called **Registration** within the *avatar menu* on the top right.

But if you really want to build a community and encourage participation in your Planio account, that may not be enough.

You might want to check out these two options in *your avatar* -\> **Administration** -\> **Settings** -\> **Authentication**:

  - **Enable registration call to action** will display registration links to anonymous users in various places where they would be able to participate if they were registered. For example, if non-members are allowed to create new issues, anonymous users will see a link saying **Please register to add an issue** right on the issues list.  

    {{figure(Registration CTA for creating issues)

!registration_call_to_action_for_creating_issues@2x.png!

}}

  - **Show custom fields on registration** will – when disabled – hide any extra [custom fields](https://plan.io/customizing/) on the registration form for your Planio account to make sign ups easier on new users by not asking too much information upfront. They can always fill out these fields later after registration.

## Make Your Public Planio Your Own

Next up, we'll learn how to customize your user's experience with your Planio account. Here's how to make them feel right at home:

### Title and Welcome Text

Please navigate to *your avatar* -\> **Administration** -\> **Settings** -\> **General**. Here, you can set an **Application title** – e.g. company name – and a **Welcome text**. Welcome texts allow for regular wiki markup, so you can use formatting options and even embed your company logo.

Below you'll see a customized welcome page as it's shown to anonymous users:

{{figure(Welcome page for anonymous users)

!welcome_page_for_anonymous_users@2x.png!

}}

### Blog posts

You can also write blog posts within your public Planio projects and assign the **View blog** permission to your **Anonymous** role. They will be shown on your public Planio account and users will even be able to subscribe to them using their feed readers.

### Paid extras: Your own Design and Domain

If you'd like to take things even further, you can get your Planio account re-designed using your own logo and colors and we also offer the possibility to run your Planio account on your own Internet domain.

Both extras are included for free within our [Enterprise plan](https://plan.io/pricing/#enterprise) and are available for 15 Euro\* per month each (+ 100 Euro\* setup for the design) in all other plans. [Get in touch with us](https://plan.io/contact/#subject=Request%20for%20custom%20design%20and%20domain&description=Hello%20Planio%2C%0D%0A%0D%0AI%20would%20like%20to%20use%20a%20custom%20domain%20for%20my%20account.%20Please%20prepare%20a%20custom%20design%20based%20on%20our%20homepage%2C%20too.%0D%0A%0D%0AI%27d%20like%20to%20use%20the%20domain%3A%20...%0D%0AOur%20existing%20homepage%20is%20at%3A%20...%0D%0A%0D%0AAdditionally%2C%20we%20need...%0D%0A%0D%0AThanks%21%0D%0A%0D%0A%0D%0A) to activate these extras for your account.

\*) Prices are subject to VAT depending on where you are based.

## Popular examples

Need some examples? Here are some Planio accounts that use public projects:

  - [**Saxonica**](https://saxonica.plan.io/) – Development for the Saxon processor for XSLT, XQuery, and XML Schema

  - [**Pulp**](https://pulp.plan.io/) – A software package managing platform, run by Red Hat

Want to add your projects to the list? Get in touch and we'll list it here!