Log into your website
Users can log in using their Princeton University credentials via the Central Authentication System (CAS).
There are a few methods to log in to your site with CAS:
- Append "/cas" to your website's URL.
- Append "/login" to your website's URL to visit the login landing page, and click the "CAS Login" button.
- Some sites may have a "Log in" link in the utility menu. This is disabled by default as most visitors to most sites do not need to log in. WDS encourages sites to keep this link disabled.
In all cases, once you attempt to log in via CAS, you may be brought to the University's standard CAS login page to enter your credentials. However, if you recently logged in CAS (perhaps for some other University web application), you won't be prompted to enter your credentials and you will just be logged in to your site right away.
Note: You may also have to go through Princeton's DUO two-factor authentication when logging in with CAS. Be prepared to have your smartphone within reach.
Once you have logged in successfully, you will see the admin toolbar at the top of your page with your administrative options. The options you see here will depend on your user role.
Logins for Other Visitors
In the majority if cases, the only people that need to log into your site are editors that are manually assigned roles like content manager or site admin. However, most sites allow anyone with a Princeton Net ID to log in as well (this is the default setup). Once a user logs in for the first time, they will have a local user account automatically created for them and will appear on the users admin dashboard.
Sites allow any Princeton CAS user to log in because Site Builder's optional access control system for restricting content and webform access restrictions require it.
Note that when any logged-out visitor tries access a page that requires authentication (e.g., a restricted page, webform, or admin page), they will be automatically logged in via CAS (assuming they are a Princeton user and have a CAS account). This conveniently allows you to provide a link directly to restricted pages without asking users to first login to the website.
Logging Out
There are several ways to log out:
- Append /logout to the domain of your website.
- In the admin toolbar, click your username, then the "Log out" link
- Some websites may have a "Log out" link in the utility menu.
When logging out, users are logged out of the website and also logged out from CAS. That means the next time a user tries to log into any website or web application that requires CAS authentication, they will be required to re-enter their CAS credentials.
Automatic Logins
The University’s CAS setup allows Princeton users to maintain an active CAS session up to many hours by logging in just once. After the first login, any other websites or web applications that require a CAS login can use that same login session without prompting the user for credentials again.
WDS can optionally configure your site's homepage so that visitors are automatically logged in if they have an active CAS session already. If they don't have an active CAS session, they just see your site as a logged out user. This feature is most useful for sites where the majority of the visitors would be logging in anyway, but you don't necessarily want to force all visitors to login. Contact us if you think you need this setup.
Automatic Logouts
Authenticated users will be automatically logged out after 12 hours of inactivity. The next time they visit the site, they'll need to log in again by following any of the methods listed at the top of this page.