Yet another "Can Drupal do this?" post.
Hello,
Drupal n00b here. Did some searching, and didn't find a direct answer. But I see lots of "Can Drupal do this?" posts, so I assume that this is the place to ask...
Here's what I want to do:
Main page of my site, say mydomain.org/ has publicly accessible stuff, mostly general information, announcements, etc. Probably only a couple of people would be able to change anything. Most users would not log in, and would have re-only access.
Linked from there would be a "Members" area. To see anything at all, users would need to log in. This area would have blogs, forums, whatever. So people might be able to post to some stuff here.
With the Users, Rolls, Groups in Drupal, can I set up something like this? Any pointers on how to do it?
My web host offers Drupal via Fantastico install, so I'll probably just install it and start playing, but it would be nice to have a little direction before I get going. Which brings up another question. If I install Drupal for testing, at mydomain.org/drupal, leaving my current site in place, can I later move it to root of mydomain.org/ when I'm ready to go live with it?
Thanks in advance for any info.
Jeff.
Good news!
Jeff,
I think you'll find this surprisingly simple to do. I'm not sure what version of Drupal you're using, so I can't be specific, but check out some of the node privacy modules.
Yes, roles is the answer, along with the above.
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Felix web Creations
Thanks
divrom,
Thanks for the answer.
My web host installs 6.1 by default from cpanel, so that's what I have up for a test.
I'll have to do some testing to see how it works out.
Yup
Indeed, this is possible... and like most things in Drupal there are a bunch of ways to do it depending on how much fine-grained control you want ;)
For restricting the ability to edit/create content, Drupal offers lots of flexibility out of the box... but for restricting the ability to see content, Drupal core kind of gives you an "all or nothing" situation (you can set it up so some groups of users can read your site's content and others can't, but nothing in between).
So, you do need to look at some extra modules for this, and indeed, there are tons of them. There are two basic "strategies" that I'm aware of: taxonomy access and node access.
With taxonomy access (for example, the Taxonomy Access Control Lite module), the way it works is that you create "tags" that you can apply to your content (for example, your tag might be called "Member's Only") and then set it up so that content with this tag is only visible to certain users, whereas content without that tag is visible to everyone. You might also combine this with the Vocabulary Permissions and Taxonomy Defaults modules to hide these tags from your users.
With node access, there are a bunch of possible modules, and you can either set it up so certain content types are visible to certain users (e.g., all blogs are visible to logged-in users but not anonymous users) or even set it up so that permissions are controlled on a node-by-node (a.k.a. "page-by-page") basis.
My personal opinion is that taxonomy access is best if you want fine-grained control. For example, if you want to set it up so that some blogs are public and others aren't, and you want to be able to easily switch them back and forth, then it feels like the most natural solution to me. But if you know that you always want ALL your blogs to be private, the node access modules might be simpler.
You might also want to think about Drupal 5 vs. Drupal 6... Drupal 6 is still very new, so a lot of the above contributed modules aren't ready for it yet (but will be soon). As for moving your installation between directories, it's no problem... Drupal's internal links are auto-generated and will work regardless of where you put it.
Good luck!
Thanks!
David,
Thank you for the info. Looks like I've got some reading and testing to do.
The Taxonomy approach you mention sounds like exactly what I want to do. I'll probably go that route.
Thanks again,
Jeff.