By matty2470 on

I sent a post the other day, and I am not convinced I got the answer I was looking for.....

I need to make a corporate intranet.

The key to such sites is not about everybody posting stuff.........which seems to be the core of drupal, but it is more the opposite its abot control of viewing access......

I always use mambo, but Mambo cannot handle this, and neither, it would seem can the majority of opensource cms systems.

Drupal clearly isnt geared towards this, and it seems not to be part of the core architecture, but so much of what I see about Drupal I like and I just need to know once and for all....the following:-)

Can I control access to viewing content, simply. Moreover will my client be able to stop people from marketing department seeing info that is only pertinent to the sales department?

Can I turn off community functionality so not everyone can post info?

Basically my exhaustive search has brought me down to Drupal and Xaraya. Typo3 could be the ruin of me from wht I have read,

I think you all appreciate the decision that has to be made because one you start you get further and further and then you find out that you have to adandon ship becaus ethe system isnt the right one. If someone could point me in the right direction I would be so grateful:-)

Comments

gollyg’s picture

gollyg commented

I have had limited experience in controlling access to content but Drupal does support this in several ways:

  • roles - each user can be assigned one or more roles. The defaults are anonymous and authenticated, but you can add as many roles as you require (similar to groups for windows)
  • each module allow you to control privleges for various areas of functionality via these roles. Eg you can assign one role read privileges and another read/write privleges. The granularity of these settings is determined by the module creator, but can be hacked to add most things you would need
  • Nodes can be categorised by taxonomy, and access to these taxonomy terms can be restricted to certain user roles. This adds another level of access control and requires the taxonomy access module to be enabled.

In short, I believe that Drupal will support the security settings you require but hell, what do I know ;)?

chiggsy’s picture

chiggsy commented

check this module:
http://drupal.org/project/node_privacy_byrole

it and the user level stuff should be able to do this. It seems that you want the total sum of your data arranged into something like database views.. where Sales sees things in Sales and General, but not the node that contains links to Programming's Star Trek torrents etc..

matty2470’s picture

matty2470 commented

Thank you - I guess with this I have a pretty good ACL system.........hopefully I will be able to get the architecture right in Drupal

Thanks

matty2470’s picture

matty2470 commented

Thanks for both replies:-) This is a great forum

kae’s picture

kae commented

matt, this is doable via node privacy by access if you have only a few groups. if you have 500 groups (such as each precinct in a state of the Democratic party) then the forms get too long.

monjohn’s picture

monjohn commented

Another option that I have just begun to use is Organic Groups. You can't use this with taxonomy access. However, it seems that it might be more suitable for you. On its setting page, it gives these options:

Visibility of posts:

  • Visible only within the targeted groups
  • Visible within the targeted groups and on other pages
  • Visibility chosen by author/editor using a checkbox on the posting form. Checkbox defaults to Public.
  • Visibility chosen by author/editor using a checkbox on the posting form. Checkbox defaults to Private.

    • Maybe someone else who has great experience with it could clarify.

myriad’s picture

myriad commented

I worked with Typo3 for a while, and it gives you 100% control over access. Highly detailed and can be very restrictive. It has the best module system I've seen, as you can search for modules from within your Admin page and it installs, updates, and uninstalls database tables as needed. Amazing.

But jeez louis, is it ever a tough system to get going on your own! It's a nice system, but I think they started off with a bad architecture causing the system to become unneccessarily complicated, however stable and self correcting as it is.

I believe Drupal started with the right architecture and is as complicated as it's going to get. In fact, it will probably get easier to use once the installation scripts are standardized and modules can be cleaned out of the database.

Stick with Drupal! \(^O^)/\(^0^)/

styro’s picture

styro commented

yep, all the community features like forums, blogs, comments etc can be easily turned off (or even just restricted to certain groups if needed).

And yes you can restrict content to certain groups. While per node access control is part of vanilla Drupal, there is no default user interface for managing it out of the box. There are about 4 modules that provide this (that I know of) - each with a different focus and way of working (hence the no default method).

The modules to look for are: taxonomy_access, node_privacy_byrole, simple access (?), and organic groups. There may even be others now :)

Try them out and choose the one that suits you best, but keep in mind that there should really only be one of them installed at once.

Hope that helps...

--
Anton

kae’s picture

kae commented

nothing mentioned here scales, including og or taxonomy. everything gets put on one long row or column and doesn't work if the list is long
i don't know if typo3 is better for the interface. more about typo3 at
54042

m, what did you decide? please post back!

myriad’s picture

myriad commented

Typo3 uses a very different approach to site interface and design than drupal. You must be skilled with html and some programming to get started with typo3. It has a good module that allows you to plug and play your information into a predesigned html page, such as a purchased template. Drupal does a lot of it's own html-ing internally for providing info but with typo you have to do almost all of it. This could be a good or bad point, but it means you have to spend A LOT of time learning the system including it's own scripting language.

The admin interface is built and ready to go and is very powerful. It is, however, independent from the main site that users see. This means that although users can log in to the front page, it's a pain in the neck to have them able to create content for the site. Anyone who adds pages or content is expected to log in to the backend admin page and fiddle around there, thus changing the whole user experience. More modules are popping up with front end editting, but it's very complicated for a newbie.

And just to add, the modules for typo3 are not very good or useful. The community feels to be trying to make money through consulting services rather than an cooperative group effort. I spent several months trying to figure out typo3, and even the simplist tasks took much time to understand how to do.

gollyg’s picture

gollyg commented

One point worth mentioning - I have recently implemented a site using taxonomy access in an intranet environment. There were severe issues with the proxy server caching pages which led to protected pages being viewable by users without appropriate permissions, including user information!

I did post on this topic, but didn't get any replies. I feel it is a serious issue to consider when deploying withing an intranet environment.

There may be some page expiry header that can overcome this issue, but I am not sure how to approach it.

Maybe someone else has some experience?