Users, roles and permissions

As in real life, for a content management system, it is not as easy to decide who can do what.

User account

To create, modify and delete content in a content management system, you need a user account. This account contains at least a username and a password. Both are necessary for the system to remember who is the author or creator of that content. Often the e-mail address is queried to send an activation link to that e-mail address. If the potential user receives that e-mail and is able to answer or click on the activation link, most systems assume that this user is a "human being" and not a spam program.

Login, Logout

If you want to work in the system, you must sign in (log in) with your user data. The system then knows with whom it deals with. After work, you should disconnect. Many systems disconnect their users automatically after a certain period of inactivity.

Roles

As in real life, each user plays one or more roles. In content management systems, every user account is a registered user. The company employees are also included. At this point, it is necessary to have different roles to distinguish all the user accounts. Customers will become perhaps premium users and staff can have a number of roles depending on the size of the company. I am thinking of content managers, editors, administrators, community managers, etc.

Each user can be assigned to each of these roles.

Visitors to the site have of course no user account. They are usually assigned to a role with the name "guest" or "anonymous".

Permissions

The permissions that a user has on the site are assigned to the role. The advantage is that when a new user account is created it is only neccessary to assigned a role and all permissions are already assigned to that user.

By "permissions" is understood the permission to create an article, or the permission to assign a user a role. In complex systems there are hundreds of such permissions. The permissions to a role are similar to a job description or contract in a company. The role defines the function of the employee.