[drupal-devel] Permissions aren't transparent

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

Hi there!

One problem with Drupal is the way it handles user permissions. The
permissions are attached to the user object but nobody really knows what
they do. To find out what a particular permission allows you to do, you
often need to have a look at the code. More important: The user does not
know which permissions he has.

I propose to change the structure of the _perm hook:

foo_perm() {
  return array('create foo', 'admin foo');
}

is the current structure.

foo_perm() {
  return array('create foo' => t('Lets you create nodes of type foo.'),
               'admin foo' => t('Lets you administer nodes of type foo.')
              );
}

is the proposed structure.

The idea is to not only display the additional blurb on the admin
permission page, but also on a sub tab of the user profile pages (or
directly on /user/n).

Opinions?

Cheers,
	Gerhard