If you have a lot of authors in your Bridge account and want to ensure that those authors are not modifying content created by their peers, Bridge Support can turn on a feature to limit content editing to owners.

What this means is that anyone who can author content - this can be through the Bridge author role or any custom role where authoring is enabled - is only able to edit their own content.

The one exception to this is that Account Admins can edit anything, even if they aren’t an owner or editor.

It’s important to note that there are pluses and minuses to this feature. On the one hand, it decreases admin load to enable authoring in your account with full freedom; however, the freedom can make it feel a little bit like the Wild West without proper checks and balances on course nomenclature and quality control.

The opposite of this is that locking down authoring permissions can increase administrative load by creating a dependency on the highest level personnel to grant approvals and manage content updates.

In this example, I am James Manager, and I have authored “History of NYSNC” in my Bridge account.

When in the course, I have the option to edit. This is evident in Bridge because of the pencil that is available in the top right hand corner of the piece of content.

If James Manager goes into a course authored by Stephanie Admin (i.e. “History of Britney Spears”), that pencil option is not available when the limit content editing to owners is enabled.

If that feature were not enabled, James Manager would have the ability to go in and edit the course because authoring is available for the manager role.

Going into that same course, “History of Britney Spears,” when the feature is off, the pencil icon is now available to James Learner.

It is important to note that a termination of an owner of a course will make the course only accessible to the Account Admin for editing purposes.

The Account Admin can transfer author ownership in the Course management interface.

You can also add content editors via the API. The additional authors will not show in Bridge, but they will have editing capabilities.

To add an additional author, you will do a POST on (this call requires an Account Admin level token):  https://{{domain}}.bridgeapp.com/api/author/course_templates/:course_id/authors

The body of the call will look like this:

The users_id that will be used in this call is the Bridge user_id given to the individual users. You can get this id from the URL when on the user's profile.

In the example below, James Manager is user_id 3.

This information is also available from the “export all users” quick action in the main navigation. The user_id will appear in column A.

At this time, it is not possible to set up a group to assign content editors. It has to be processed at the user level via that API.

To see which users have been set as an author, you can run a GET request on the same endpoint.

If you are unfamiliar with APIs or need additional assistance to understand this feature, please reach out to Bridge Support.