Appendix 1: Types of users and access permissions

This chapter describes the types of users and access permissions available in the CMS.

Users can be broken down into two broad categories;

  • Guests
  • Registered Users

Guests are simply users of your website who managed to navigate their way to your site. Depending on how the site administrator has configured the site, users may be free to browse all the content or restricted to a subset of the content available with some content been reserved for registered users.

Registered users have registered with your site to obtain a username and password. This username and password allows registered users to log into your site, receiving special privileges not available to guests. Registered users are broken down into groups:

  • Frontend users
  • Backend Users.

Note: In the admin panel, these two groups of users are labeled as Public Frontend and Public Backend.

Frontend users are granted certain additional rights over guests, which may include the ability to create and publish content on the website. We will generally refer to these users as content providers since their primary goal is to provide content on the website, not to administer the site or alter its design.

Content providers may provide new content right through the web interface using an embedded WYSIWG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor without any knowledge of HTML coding.

Within this broad classification of content providers are four specific roles, which can beassigned by the site administrator. Those roles are:

Registered A registered user has no ability to create, edit or publish content in the website. They may submit new links for publication and they may have access to restricted content that is not available to guests.
Author Authors, can create content, signify certain aspects of how the content is to be displayed and specify the date for when the material should be published.
Editor An editor has all the abilities of an author plus the ability to edit content of their own articles as well as that of any other author.
Publisher Publishers can perform all the duties of authors and editors plus have the ability to actually publish an article.

The default user role in the Frontend is registered user.

Backend users are typically thought of as the site administrators. Just as with the Frontend users, Backed users may have different privileges and the following are their default original privileges:

Manager A manager can be thought of as a publisher with access to the backend administrator’s panel. Managers have access to all the content associated controls in the administrator panel but are not able to change templates, alter page layouts, or add or delete extensions. Managers also have no authority to add users or alter existing user profiles.
Administrator Administrators have a broader range of access than managers. In addition to all the content related activities that a manager can perform, administrators can add and delete extensions to the website, alter user profiles equal to their own permission levels or below. What they cannot do is edit the profiles of Super Administrator’s, change global settings of the website and alter the template. Indeed, Super Administrators do not even show up in the user manager when users are logged in as an administrator.
Super Administrator The Super Administrator has unrestricted abilities to perform all administrative functions. The Super Administrator can create users to give them the role of manager and administrator. And only Super Administrators have the ability to create new users with Super Administrator permissions or to assign Super Administrator permissions to existing users.