Roles

One of the aspects of a Drupal-based website that is different about other types of websites is the fact that in addition to having a user identity, each participant is also assigned a role by the site's Administrative User when the participant's account is created.

What this means: as the site grows and changes over time —and as people come and go — it would be a good idea to get in the habit of thinking in terms of roles rather than users.

Permissions

The role that an individual user has been assigned to also determines what the user will be able to do on the site because the Administrative User assigns a set of permissions to each role.

For example, if User A is able to edit a document that User B created, but User C isn't able to do so, it's because the User A has been assigned a role with the permissions set up to do this task but User C hasn't.

FYI: when Drupal is installed on a web server, two default roles are created, anonymous users and authenticated users. The person who installs Drupal on the server is known as "admin" and this person can create other roles, including the Administrative User role.

On the Science Libraries site, admin created the Administrative User role, and the Administrative User was in turn given permission to create other roles and to assign the permissions to them. The Managing Editor keeps track of the content on the site, and makes assignments as needed.

Two additional roles exist on this site:

Author

This role was set up for users who would be creating and maintaining content on the site, including event listings. The default input format is a WYSIWYG editor known as CKeditor (although it can be toggled on or off, as desired).

This type of user doesn't need any XHTML or CSS skills, although it may be helpful to have some experience with those tools. However, the goal is to make it as easy to create content for this Drupal-based site as it is to post a story on a library blog, so a WYSIWYG editor has been made available to the authors on this site.

Tip: You can turn off the CKeditor if you need to view the HTML source code by clicking on the Source button in the tool bar.

Editor

This role was set up for users who would be involved with editing any of the content on the site as well as creating original content of their own, including electronic resource descriptions.

The default input format is Filtered HTML, although Full HTML is available (and Full HTML is the recommended input format for some of the pages on the site). These users would need some XHTML and CSS skills. For some of the pages, including the About the Science Libraries page, JavaScript experience might also be needed.

FYI: these roles are flexible and can change over time. Also, an individual user can be assigned to a new role at any time.

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Page owner: John Ridener