Users and permissions

This part of the manual is about the people who use the site: their accounts, the groups they belong to, and what each of them may do. In the administration it all starts at the Users tab.

Users and groups are items

User accounts and user groups are items in the tree, like folders and articles, kept in a part of their own below Users. You create, edit, move and remove them the same way, with the same buttons and the same edit form. A user is an item of the type User: its User account field holds the username, the e-mail address and the password. A user group holds users and other groups.

A new installation has these groups, among others:

The Users part of the tree is in the section Users, which anonymous visitors may not read: user accounts never show on the public site.

What a user may do: roles and policies

A user may do what the roles of their account and of their groups allow, and nothing else. A role is a set of policies; each policy allows one module, or one function of a module, possibly only in some sections, for some types or below some places. The place where you create an account therefore decides what the person may do. See Roles and policies: who may do what.

Every user account and group has two tabs for this:

• Roles: the roles assigned to it, each with its limitation.
• Policies: role by role, the module, the function and the limitations of every policy.

The left column of the Users tab

Below the tree, Access control leads to:

Each link shows only to roles that may open the page.

The chapters of this part

• Managing users: add, change, move, disable and unlock accounts.
• Roles and policies: who may do what
• Creating a protected area: pages only members may read.
• User registration: visitors create their own account.
• User registration with approval: new accounts wait for an approver.
• Accounts of site members: what editors do for members.
• Your account and Two-step sign-in
• Password rules and expiry

What can go wrong

• You cannot see the Users tab. Your role does not include it. Editors usually see only the Members group, and Editors to request a new colleague's account.
• Removing an account removes the user. Items with a user account cannot be sent to the trash, so a removed user is gone for good, and the link between the person and the content they wrote is lost. Disable the account instead when in doubt.

Read more

• Setting up accounts for editors and administrators, in the help center.
• How do I see what a user may do?
• The user audit log