[development] Even more flexibility in content management

[Dries Buytaert]

On 28 Dec 2006, at 22:23, Zohar Stolar wrote:
> I was looking through Drupal.org to find if there is work towards  
> granulating the permissions table a bit more, by adding a way to  
> limit administer/access to nodes by type.
> The idea (which has certainly been raised before) is to add, next to:
>
> "create TYPE content", - adding new nodes of that content type
> "edit own TYPE content", - editing the contents of own nodes of  
> that content type
> "edit TYPE content", - editing the contents of all nodes of that  
> content type (whether or not the user has right to create nodes)
>
> two more possibilities:
>
> "view TYPE content" - roles that are allowed to view the content  
> type's nodes
> "administer TYPE content" - roles that are allowed to modify the  
> publishing options on all nodes of that content type

It's strange that so many people shout 'yes'.  I think this is the  
wrong approach to the problem.  We need to differentiate between:

   (i) access to functionality
  (ii) access to content/nodes

(i) can be managed using regular permissions, but (ii) can't be  
managed using permissions.  For (ii), we need node-level  
permissions.  Why?  Because we need to fix (ii) at the SQL layer so  
that inaccessible content disappears from pages, blocks, pagers, etc.

In fact, we should move 'edit TYPE content' and 'edit own TYPE  
content' from (i) to (ii).  For many people these permissions don't  
make sense.  They want to say something like 'edit content in  
category Traveling' and/or 'edit own content in category Traveling'.

--
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/