Group and role strategies

There are several ways you can define permissions. You can either have many groups with one role each or only few groups with several roles. From a technical point of view it is more or less the same amount of content. Focus on user friendliness and easy-to-understand groupings instead.

One strategy is to first open access to everything and then close it systematically. The opposite is to first close access to everything and then open it systematically.

Open / close

Assume you have the following website structure:

/home
   /section1
   /section2
   /section3
   /section4

An "open/close" strategy could have the following ACL:

First open access to the website, then close it systematically by defining read-only permissions for /home/section1 and /home/section2 and denying access to /home/section4. When you attach this ACL to a role, the role can read sections 1 and 2, edit section 3 (by virtue of being granted write access to /), and is denied access to section 4.

You can achieve similar permissions as above, but with several roles:

Having many roles allows flexibility in defining different groups. On the other hand you get more complexity.

Close / open

Assume the following website structure:

/home
   /section1
   /section2
   /section3
   /section4

A "close/open" strategy could have the following ACL:

First close access to the website, then open it systematically by defining read-only permissions to sections 1 and 2, and write permission to section 3. When you attach this ACL to a role, the role can read sections 1 and 2, edit section 3 and is denied access to section 4.

Effectively, this strategy has the same outcome as the "open/close" strategy above for a user who needs to be able review content in sections 1 and 2, edit section 3, but should not be able to access section 4 at all.