Group and role strategies
There are several ways you can define permissions. You can either have many groups with one role each or only few groups with several roles. From a technical point of view it is more or less the same amount of content. Focus on user friendliness and easy-to-understand groupings instead.
One strategy is to first open access to everything and then close it systematically. The opposite is to first close access to everything and then open it systematically.
Open / close
Assume you have the following website structure:
/home /section1 /section2 /section3 /section4
An open/close strategy could have the following ACL:
| Permission | Path |
|---|---|
Read/Write |
|
Read only |
|
Read only |
|
Deny access |
|
First open access to the website, then close it systematically by
defining read-only permissions for /home/section1 and /home/section2
and denying access to /home/section4. When you attach this ACL to a
role, the role can read sections 1 and 2, edit section 3 (by virtue of
being granted write access to /), and is denied access to section 4.
You can achieve similar permissions as above, but with several roles:
| Role | Permission | Path |
|---|---|---|
Managing Editor |
Read/Write |
|
Section 1 Reviewer |
Read only |
|
Deny access |
|
|
Section 2 Reviewer |
Read only |
|
Deny access |
|
Having many roles allows flexibility in defining different groups. On the other hand you get more complexity.
Close / open
Assume the following website structure:
/home /section1 /section2 /section3 /section4
A close/open strategy could have the following ACL:
| Permission | Path |
|---|---|
Deny access |
|
Read only |
|
Read only |
|
Read/Write |
|
First close access to the website, then open it systematically by defining read-only permissions to sections 1 and 2, and write permission to section 3. When you attach this ACL to a role, the role can read sections 1 and 2, edit section 3 and is denied access to section 4.
Effectively, this strategy has the same outcome as the open/close
strategy above for a user who needs to be able review content in
sections 1 and 2, edit section 3, but should not be able to access
section 4 at all.