Managing roles and permissions

Generally, when we think about managing users in Drupal, we first think about what role the user has and what permissions they have been assigned. We don't just blindly start creating users without having an idea of what function they will perform or what limitations we may want to enforce upon them. For that reason, we need to ask ourselves what is a role?

What is a role?

A role in Drupal helps to define what a user can do. By default, a role lacks permissions and is just a named grouping that helps to identify a specific set of functionality or privileges that may be assigned.

For example, in a typical editorial workflow, you may have users who can contribute content, editors who review the content, and a publisher who schedules the content to be published at a specific time. Each of these users will have a corresponding role of a contributor, editor, and publisher and a defined set of permissions that will be assigned to each role.

We can navigate to the Roles...