Joomla's ACL revolves around certain additional parameters that are in
the back-end of Joomla
that we haven't even touched yet.
There are users; of course, those are the people who log into the Web site. There
are user groups; every user belongs to a user group, and permissions are assigned
to those user groups.
There are core permissions that are available; these are the things that people
can and cannot do on the Web site, and there are access levels.
And so I am going to give you a quick overview of what user groups are, and
then in the next video, I'll show you how to create a user once we know what
the user groups are.
So here in the back-end of Joomla,
we're going to start by going to Users > Groups, and this will show us all of the
default user groups that are available to us here in Joomla,
again, by default. There is absolutely no reason to keep any of these groups. You
are more than welcome to go through and delete whatever you've got here.
Just remember, you can't delete the Super User group if you've already got
somebody in it; that would be a very bad thing.
But the groups that are here by default are the groups that were available in
Joomla! 1.5, with one new addition.
So let me tell you about the groups that we've all known and loved for so many years.
Public means anybody who is coming to the front-end of your Website; they just
come to see the Web site. They aren't interacting with the login screens at all.
These are just the people that arrive on the Web site.
Registered users are one step up from this.
Registered users are allowed to log in to the Web site, but they can't edit any
articles, or create articles, or do anything else; just logging in, and sometimes
just logging in is all you need, because that will allow you to see information
that perhaps somebody without a login would not be able to see.
Authors are able to create new content for the Web site, and they can edit their own content,
but they can't edit any other pages on the Web site. In other words, they can't
edit articles they didn't write, and authors cannot publish what they write.
So anything that they write on the Web site is unpublished by default, and it has
to be reviewed by somebody before it can be published.
Editors are able to create new content for the Web site, as well as edit any
content that's available on the Web site.
So anybody's content, written by anybody, anywhere, an Editor can edit.
But again, they can't publish any content, or unpublish content. That is the
job of a Publisher.
The Publisher inherits all of those permissions from before.
They can log in to the front-end, they can create content, they can edit
anybody's content, and they can publish, and then unpublish content.
So Registered, Author, Editor, and Publisher all have to do with the front-end
of the Web site, logging in from the front-end.
None of those user groups are allowed to login from the back-end of the Web site.
People that can login to the back-end of the Web site include the Manager,
Administrator, and Super Users.
So, when the Manager logs in to the back-end of the Web site, they get a stripped
down version of the menu that's seen here.
For example, they are allowed to create content, and they are allowed to put
things in the Media Manager, and create new menu items,
but a manager is not allowed to, for example, manipulate the components, they
can't touch the templates, they may have no access to the modules.
So a lot of things are stripped out from Managers, although they can log in to
the back-end of the Web site.
Administrators can do almost everything that we have been seeing here inside of
Joomla, except Administrators don't have access to the global configuration, and
many of the Options screens.
So like the article Options, the module options;
the template options; all of the options that we've been seeing in practice.
And then, of course, finally, there are Super Users.
And Super Users can log in anywhere, see anything; do anything.
So those are the default groups that came with Joomla! 1.5.
We've since added a new group;
this is a new group to Joomla! 3,
and that is the Guest group. And the concept behind the Guest group is,
sometimes you'd like some content that shows up on the Web site by default when
people are visiting the Web site, and they are not logged in at all,
but when someone is logged into the Web site, you'd like that content to
disappear, and you'd like people to be able to see a different option instead,
and that is the function of the Guest group.
I am going to go through how you can use the Guest group in your Web site a
little bit later on in the videos.
So that's a brief overview of what the user groups are, and I am going to go
ahead and put these user groups to work in the next video, where I create a
new user.