Explaining Drupal Roles and Permissions

The Drupal CMS includes the ability to set up "Roles" and "Permissions." With this system, we can set up a very comprehensive back-end for your content management system so that you can easy control what users do and do not have access to do.

Permissions give us fine-grained control over what a user can and cannot do. For instance, we might allow someone to post blog entries, but forbid them to be able to change your website's menu items. We might give some users the ability to moderate forums or comments or other community aspects, while preventing them from being able to view store reports and order histories.

Roles are simply sets of permissions. Roles give us the ability to set permissions for a group of users once, and then add users to that group whenever necessary. We do this by assigning a specific role to a specific user.

For example, every new site that we implement has an Administrator role that includes all permissions by default, and the site owner is always granted that role. By doing this, we ensure that site owners have full access and complete control over their site. We also include a customization that ensure that even new modules and permissions that may be added are automatically granted to the Administrator role (Drupal, by default, only gives the Super Admin account full access to new modules and permissions).

Sites can have as many roles as they need. Users can also be granted multiple roles. Role logic dictates that if permission is granted with one role, then that user will receive that permission even if other roles assigned to them do not grant it. Therefore, roles can be stacked on users and successive permissions granted easily.

Please contact us if you need help understanding how roles and permissions work with your Drupal CMS website, or if you think you need additional roles set up.