What are permissions in a CMS?
Permissions determine who can do what in the CMS. As an example, permissions can be attached to unique user accounts to determine who can delete pages in the CMS. Alternately, permissions could be used to determine which pages anonymous web visitors can view.
How do CMS’s implement permissions differently?
At a basic level, nearly all CMS’s will implement an administrative account (username/password) that is used to manage the web site’s content. However, moving beyond the basics different CMS’s might have very different answers to the following questions:
- How many unique administrative accounts can exist?
- How can administrative accounts be grouped (roles)?
- How granular (site, page, content, posts, images) can permissions be?
- What types of actions (create, modify, approve, delete) can permissions be attached to?
- How is inheritance handled? Do child pages inherit the permissions of their parent page? Can this inheritance be broken?
