Creating an Online Newsletter with Drupal
By Michael J. Ross2008-07-11
Access Control
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At this point, the forum has not been added to the site menu system seen by a visitor, whether authenticated (i.e., logged in) or not. Unfortunately, Drupal's native access control does not distinguish between forum and non-forum content. As a result, if you tried to prevent unauthenticated users from viewing forum content, then they would not even be able to see your homepage's text.
To solve this dilemma, we will use a third-party Drupal module. Download and install the Content Access module, specifically, version 5.x-1.3.
Go to Administer > Site building > Modules, and enable the Content Access module.
This module allows you to manage permissions for content types by role and author. Hence, we need to create a new subscriber role, in Administer > User management > Roles, as shown in the screenshot below.
Presumably, when you have verified that an authenticated user has paid for their subscription, you would assign that user to this new role. Edit the role's permissions so that users assigned to the role can read and post comments.
After you have saved the permissions changes for the new subscriber role, edit the permissions for the authenticated user role: For the comment module settings, disable their ability to access or post comments, since only subscribers should be allowed to do that.
Set the access control for this new subscriber role, so they can view and edit forum content: Go to Administer > Content management > Content types > Forum topic > edit > "Access control" to assign these settings. Change the settings so that only authors and subscribers can view and edit forum content,
Tutorial Pages:
» Introduction
» Laying the Foundation
» Initial Theme
» The Homepage
» The Newsletter
» Access Control
» Navigation
