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Editor guides

Understanding user permissions - or why can't I ...

We are updating our documentation library to be ready for the Sector 10! Find out more in our Sector 10 roadmap or head straight to our collection of Sector 10 - Changes and Updates.

User role
Content Editor Content Administrator Drupal Sitebuilder
Task
Content editing
Topic
User roles and permissions
Product
Sector Starter kit

If you find that you can’t edit something on your site - perhaps a menu, block, or specific content type - your user profile likely doesn’t have the required role to allow you to do this task.

Each user in Drupal is assigned at least one user role - you can learn more in Preconfigured user roles, user profiles and permissions.

Editorial user roles

For editorial staff, the important user roles are the Content Editor and Content Administrator roles. 

Both Content Editor and Content Administrator users can create, edit, and delete content. The content administrators have some extra permissions compared to content editors - they are able to configure some settings and content that editors cannot. These include:

  • Blocks and block classes - content administrators can administer blocks and block classes
  • Text formats - content administrators can use the Full HTML text format 
  • Media - content administrators can administer and delete any media. Content editors can delete their own media. 
  • Redirect - content administrators can administer individual (per node) and global URL redirect settings
  • Site reports -  content administrators can see the site report. 
  • Taxonomies - content administrators can administer vocabularies and terms
  • View unpublished - content administrators to see and edit all unpublished content, while those with the Content Editor role can only see their own unpublished content.

Sector add-ons and permissions 

Most Sector add-ons will hook into the permission management and set editorial permissions for new content types following the blueprint provided by the Starter Kit.

Occasionally, an add-on will add new roles and permission - Sector Blog comes with a 'blog editor' user role, which is additional & requires a user to also be a content editor. More information can be found per content type or add-on in Sitebuilding 101 - Sector content types and displays.

But, I need to ... 

If you are unable to do an editorial task on your site, you can ask someone with a higher user role to do this for you. Alternately, if this is a task that you will be performing often, you can ask to be assigned a higher user role which would allow you to complete the task.

Warning - Use caution when assigning roles

Roles give the user different privileges - some roles have security implications, so should be given with caution.

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