Adding Users in Drupal

Adding Users in Drupal

1. Go to your Drupal site and log in.
2. In the administration toolbar, select “People”.

Drupal is very flexible when it comes to user administration. Here is a brief description about what you can set for Drupal users:

Permissions:

Permissions let you control what users can do on your site. Each user role (defined on the Permissions tab, then click on the Roles link) has its own set of permissions. For example, you could give users classified as "Administrators" permission to "administer nodes" but deny this power to ordinary, "authenticated" users. You can use permissions to reveal new features to privileged users (those with subscriptions, for example). Permissions also allow trusted users to share the administrative burden of running a busy site.

Roles:

Roles allow you to fine tune the security and administration of Drupal. A role defines a group of users that have certain privileges as defined under the Permissions tab, permissions link. Examples of roles include: anonymous user, authenticated user, moderator, administrator and so forth. In this area you will define the role names of the various roles. To delete a role choose "edit role" and it will have a delete option. (**note: some default roles are locked and you cannot delete them**)

By default, Drupal comes with three user roles:

Anonymous user: this role is used for users that don't have a user account or that are not authenticated.

Authenticated user: this role is automatically granted to all logged in users.

Administrator: this is the role that allows you to edit everything in the site. Do not delete this-you won’t be able to edit your site if you do!

Managing users:

The “People” link allows you to set up users on your site. You can allow users to register, login, and log out. Users benefit from being able to sign on because it associates content they create with their account and allows various permissions to be set for their roles. The user module supports user roles which establish fine grained permissions allowing each role to do only what the administrator wants them to. Each user can be assigned to one or more roles.

Users can specify personal configuration settings through their individual My account page. Users must authenticate by supplying a local username and password or through their OpenID, an optional and secure method for logging into many websites with a single username and password. In some configurations, users may authenticate using a username and password from another Drupal site, or through some other site-specific mechanism.

A visitor accessing your website is assigned a unique ID, or session ID, which is stored in a cookie. The cookie does not contain personal information, but acts as a key to retrieve information from your site. Users should have cookies enabled in their web browser when using your site.

1. For our purposes, I suggested that you should create the following users:

To do this, we first have to create the roles. From the People management screen, click on the Permissions tab, then click on the Roles link, which will bring you to the following screen:

1. Enter Contributor in the blank field at the bottom of the screen and click “Add role”. Repeat this process to add Editorand Commenter. Once you have done this, your screen will look something like this:

1. Now we need to set the permissions for each role. Click on Edit Permissions next to Contributor; this will bring you to the following screen:

1. For contributor, we want them to be able to create content, delete their own content, and edit their own content. It makes sense to also allow them to comment on content. So, we want to put checkmarks next to the following Permissions:

View comments

Post comments

Skip comment approval

Edit own comments

If you want them to be able to add menu links, you would also want to go under Menu and check “Administer menus and menu items”, but for this user, we do not.

We do want them to be able to edit content, so under Node, the following should be checked:

View published content

View own unpublished content

Article Create new content

Article Edit own content

Article Delete own content

If you are using the basic page content type, you would also probably want to enable:

Basic page create new content

Basic page edit own content

Basic page delete own content

Then be sure to Save permissions.

1. For editor, we want them able to create, delete, and edit any content. So, for editor, we need to enable all of the same permissions that we used for contributor, plus we want to enable the following:

Under Menu, enable “Administer menus and menu items”

Under Node, enable:

Access the content overview page

View content revisions

Revert content revisions

Article Edit any content

Article Delete any content

And, if you are using basic pages:

Basic page edit any content

Basic page delete any content

Then be sure to Save permissions.

1. Now that the roles have been defined, we need to create our users. Click on “People” up in the administrator bar and make sure the List tab is selected. Then click on the “Add user” link.

1. Click on the Add User tab. We will add the Excecutive Publisher user. Under username, put Executive Publisher, for e-mail address, put , for password put manage1. Status should be Active, and the administrator role should be checked. (Note that the authenticated user role will be checked by default and cannot be unchecked). When you have this filled out, click “Create New Account” (see screenshot)

1. Repeat the process for the other users listed in the table above, and you should be set!

Note that visitors to the site have the option to create their own account; by default, they are not assigned any role other than “authenticated”, which basically just allows them to create comments.

So, in a nutshell, first create the roles that you want your users to have and define the permissions for the roles, then create the users and assign them to the appropriate role(s).