Drupal 7 Tutorial Part 11: Drupal 7 user concepts explained, adding new users, roles, permissions, user related settings.

Hi Drupalers,

It's time to looks into user related features in Drupal 7. In this tutorial let's check it out below following features in Drupal 7.

• Users in Drupal 7
• User Roles in Drupal 7
• How to add new users.
• Adding New Roles
• User Permissions
• User Related Settings.

Users in Drupal 7:

                There are 3 kinds of users roles are created by default with Drupal 7. In this 3 types there is one and only special user who registered while installing Drupal 7 is called Super User, This Super User (Administrator) will have all permissions in Drupal.

                All non logged in users in drupal are called anonymous users and have role called anonymous.

               All logged in users are called authenticated users and have role authenticated. Apart from these two roles Drupal 7 comes with third role called administrator.

User Roles In Drupal 7:

• A role is basically categorization of users into different types who will have some set of permissions / access to features in the site.                                             
• Some examples of roles are like content editor, content moderator, Administrator etc.
• You can create new roles easily in drupal 7 and assign permissions to roles.
• Drupal 7 comes with by default 3 roles. All guests / non logged in users have role called anonymous.
• All logged in users have role called authenticated.
• Above roles are locked means cannot be deleted since they must present for any site.
• Drupal 7 comes with third role called administrator used basically to give administrative permissions and for users who we want to give administrative access can be assigned this role.
• To access list of roles login as admin, click on People link in the top black menu bar. Once you click you will see below screen.

• Now click on permissions tab next to list tab. You will see screen like below.

• Now, click on roles link in the first paragraph to access list of roles as seen below.

• As you see above you can see 3 default roles provided by drupal 7.

Adding new roles in Drupal 7 and Assigning Permissions:

• Let's create a new role called content editor and give content related permissions to this role.
• To add a new role in Drupal 7 go to above screen and fill the text box with name content administrator and click on Add role button.
• After adding a new role you will see screen like below with confirmation message "The role has been added".

• Now let's assign content related permission to this user role. Click on edit permissions link next to content editor in above screen. You will see permission page with check boxes next to each permission.
• If you want to enable specific permission to this role enable the checkbox next to the permission and click on save permission at bottom of page.
• For role content editor let's enable content related permissions mentioned below and click on save permissions.
• Enable all the permissions under Node, Comment Section as shown below and click on save permissions.
• Now the content editor role got all permissions related to content like node comment. Now let's assign a user to this role.

Assigning Role To A User:

• Click on people link in the admin menu bar on top.
• You will see list of users like in below screen.

• Click on edit link next to user to assign role to user. You will see screen like below.

• Select content editor role check box and click on save to assign this role. Now this user will get all the permissions that content editor has.
• So, now you understood how to create new roles, assign permissions to roles, and assign roles to users.

How to add new users:

• Administrator can add users using the Add user form. This will be useful to add new users to the site manually.
• To access this interface login as administrator, click on people link on top menu bar. You will see screen like below.

• Now, Click on Add user link on top as shown in the above screen. Once, you click on the link you will see screen like below to add a new user.

• Fill all the fields above to create a new user. If you check the box Notify user of new account then e-mail will be sent to user with user credentials.
• After filling the user create form and click on Create new account button, user will be created.

Stay tuned with next post to learn how to use user account related settings.

Cheers,

Anil Sagar