Common CMS roles and access levels

Question

I am currently writing a CMS and remember someone (it might have been on here) criticise the existing CMS for not having a robust enough user permissions system. I\'ve got a me

Answer 1

I have a custom CMS built on the Zend Framework that uses Zend's ACL to extends some basic roles (so you can deny resources specifically for additional users or allow others to access resources they normally couldn't). My basic roles go from CMS users all the way down to website "members" as follows (I just use one users table to store all my authentication).

Developer

Edit any content, edit layouts, settings, configuration. Use special tools that can call shell scripts and force cron jobs.

Admin

Edit any content, edit layouts, settings.

Author

Edit content.

Member

Can view the login screen, forgot password and bug report.

Now, Zend has a nice ACL implementation so you can easily extends your base ACL class and add new roles that extend from the basic roles. So I might make an "Admin" who has access to one of the Developer tools (e.g. purge or cache management) or lock an author to only be able to manage blogs (and not for example news).