Users
A user is an account that identifies the person accessing Magnolia. In addition to a username, Magnolia stores the user preferences such as full name, email address, language, and time zone. These settings can be edited by the users themselves.
Every user has a certain set of permissions to grant access to resources, content, apps, and so on. Users inherit their permissions from the groups and roles they’re attached to (see Organizing users). Use the Security app to edit the permissions of a user.
Types of users
Different user types are used for different accounts:
- Users
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Accounts for people who work on site content such as authors, editors, and publishers.
- System users
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Technical accounts such as
superuserandanonymous. - Public users
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End users or visitors of the site. They can be registered through the Public User Registration (PUR) module. Registering visitors allows you to provide them with personalized content such as members-only sections of the site, newsletters, and mailing lists.
superuser user
The term superuser may refer either to a system user (an account type) or to a role (a definition of what a user is allowed to do in the system).
In a typical installation of Magnolia, the superuser role is assigned to the superuser account.
In addition to the superuser role, the superuser account has some other roles too (see Default roles, groups and users).
As the name implies, the permissions of the superuser account are usually unrestricted in any way.
For instance, superuser can read and write to all default JCR workspaces on /.
On a production system, create specific users with distinct roles and deactivate the superuser account.
anonymous user
The term anonymous may refer either to a system user or to a role.
The latter is assigned to the former.
Apart from the anonymous role, the anonymous system user is by default assigned other roles too (see Default roles, groups and users).
Every Magnolia resource intended to be accessible without authentication must be enabled for the anonymous system user. A users that interacts with Magnolia without authentication is determined as an anonymous user.
On most systems, the rights and permissions of the anonymous role differ between author and public instances: allowing read access to all on the public instance, while denying the same on the author instance.
That’s why you shouldn’t publish the anonymous role.
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Organizing users
In Magnolia, users are organized as follows:
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Users can have both roles and groups.
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Groups can have groups and roles.
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Roles can have only Access Control Lists (ACLs).
Permissions are defined in the ACLs. Users inherit permissions from the roles and groups assigned to them.
| You can duplicate existing users to speed up creation. The duplicated user is created with all the same groups and roles as the original. |
On a small site, you can manage users and groups in Magnolia. On a larger site (hundreds of users), it’s better to manage users and groups in an enterprise-grade user management infrastructure, such as Microsoft Active Directory. You would define roles and ACLs in Magnolia but manage users and groups in the external system.
Editing user permissions
Every user known to Magnolia is granted a set of permissions defined by roles. You can either assign roles directly to a user, or assign a user to a group that itself grants a set of roles (see Organizing users above).
Use the Security app to edit the permissions.
The app is available in the Admin group of AdminCentral.
By default, the superuser role is required to access the app.
The Security app provides subapps to edit users, groups, and roles. In the Users subapp, select the user you want to edit and click Edit user in the action bar.
A tab opens showing the user details. It has three sections:
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User info: Edit the user’s name and full name, the password, the email address, and the language. The language can also be edited in the Edit user profile dialog. You can use the tab to enable or disable a user account.
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Groups: Assign the user to existing groups.
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Roles: Grant roles to the user.
| Select any user and click User permissions in the action bar to view the permissions granted to that user. |
Automatic lockout
An automatic lockout is a security precaution that prevents users from accessing Magnolia after a number of failed login attempts.
By default, a lockout is triggered and an account is automatically disabled after N+1 failed login attempts.
The number of failed attempts can be configured.
No lockout is triggered when a username that doesn’t exist is entered.
A lockout applies to both system and admin users, but not to public users.
After a lockout, an administrator can re-enable the account by selecting the Enabled checkbox in the user profile.
When a lockout occurs, this checkbox is cleared.
You can configure the number of failed login attempts N that triggers a lockout using the maxFailedLoginAttempts property in /server/security/userManagers/system and /admin.
You can set different values for Users and System Users.
| Node name | Value |
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📁 server |
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📁 security |
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⸬ userManagers |
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⸬ system |
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⬩ class |
info.magnolia.cms.security.SystemUserManager |
⬩ lockTimePeriod |
0 |
⬩ maxFailedLoginAttempts |
5 |
⬩ realmName |
system |
⸬ admin |
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⬩ class |
info.magnolia.cms.security.MgnlUserManager |
⬩ lockTimePeriod |
0 |
⬩ maxFailedLoginAttempts |
5 |
⬩ realmName |
admin |
Properties
| Property | Description | ||
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optional, default is Allows duplicate usernames in different realms. Only applicable to |
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required A class that implements the info.magnolia.cms.security.UserManager interface. Implementations:
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optional, default is Allows to disable caching if set to |
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required Realm name corresponding to JAAS login configuration. |
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optional, default is Indicates what methods are used to deal with the
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optional A subnode that allows you to specify a custom |
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The class that implements the The default class used is magnolia.jaas.sp.ldap.connection.DefaultConnectionFactory. Two additional implementations are available:
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optional A subnode that specifies the If not defined explicitly, then the predicate accepts anything within the following namespaces:
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The class that implements the The default class is magnolia.jaas.sp.ldap.connection.EnvPropertiesDefaultPredicate. |
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optional A subnode that defines the decoding method of the admin password used by the
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The decoder is available in three implementations:
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optional, default is Specifies the number of objects to be returned in a single search result. |
External services
The LDAP Connector module is a standard JAAS login module that connects to any LDAP V3 supported directory service. This module is useful where an enterprise-grade user management infrastructure already exists. With the JAAS standard support, you can meet single sign-on requirements or connect to legacy LDAP/ADS directory servers.
