Symphony.

This post is just to explain our decision for user-level restrictions in Symphony 2.

There've been lots of requests for user management features, and I think this is the best way to address the most common ones. We're not taking any more feature requests, since extensions will be able to add most remaining features.

The attached screenshot is of the User Roles section in Settings > Preferences. Each role defined here can be applied to a user by selecting it in the "Role" select box on their edit-user page. There's also an additional "No Restrictions" option in this select box. All users can edit their own information, but only users with access to "Users (Create/Update/Delete)" can change their role.

In particular, this system will work with login events to provide users with a front-end login but no admin access, so that hopefully membership functionality will be possible without needing extensions.

Nice - thats a brilliant way to implement User Roles... Nice fine grained control! :D

Cant wait!

Indeed this looks great, well, let's say "Symphony-like"!

Brilliant. This is such a crucial feature and again you guys have implemented it brilliantly. Kudos as always.

Does anyone know if there is any movement on developing an User Roles extension? I would gladly donate to the project.

And where can the roles be found anyway? (Running 2.0.2)

@shorebreak, just to be clear, what was once referred to as Symphony 2 is now being developed as Symphony 3. So the user roles Scott is describing above do not exist in Symphony 2, but are being developed for Symphony 3.

It looks like Rowan Lewis may be developing an extension that may be worth watching on Github: Frontend Member Manager. (I'd post the link, but github.com appears to be down again.)

Will there be an API for getting information about what role a specific user belongs to so that we can use that in our own extensions?

@bzerangue, @shorebreak: Here's Rowan's Front-end Member Manager extension which bauhouse mentioned. We haven't been working on user roles for Symphony 2 so your best bet if you need this functionality is to turn to extensions.

@MattShaw: That sounds most wise. I think if there's much demand for user roles, it would make sense to integrate a popular user roles extension into the core, adding these kinds of API hooks.

Is anybody working on user roles and access management in Symphony’s backend?

I am thinking about setting up a editorial workflow for one of my projects in the coming weeks. Still I do not know the best solution. It might be a mix of frontend-publishing (for authors) and backend-publishing (for admins). I am not sure how complicated it would be to implement a “backend-only” solution based on Scott’s ideas when he started this thread.

Yes, we are working on this. Except, the new access control UI behaves like the front-end membership extension, except for the backend.

That’s amazing.

Will it be possible to define group of users and their rules? I mean more than Author group.

@rainerborene: yes. The admin access control will allow defining of roles.

Will this functionality arrive in the form of an extension or Symphony 3 (or Symphony 2.1)?

We’re still sorting this out so it may change. We’re currently looking at it as an extension and for it to be released alongside version 2.1.

Neat. :)

We’re currently looking at it as an extension and for it to be released alongside version 2.1.

I don’t think it should be released as an extension.

AFAIK, according to the “unofficial guidelines” any functionality which is not important for the majority of websites should be released as an extension.

Released as an Extension makes sense (just as the Debug and Profile pieces are extensions) but I think it should be a bundled extension with Symphony and Disabled by default. So it’s sitting there, primed and ready for when you need it, but otherwise it stays out of your way.

I’m sure the appropriate discussion about how it is to be implemented will be raised in due course.

I think it’s a necessary feature, absolutely.