Creating Roles in Drupal 5

From the default installation, Drupal sets up two roles for you. What are these roles, what can I do with them, and can I create more? I hope to answer these questions for you.

What are roles?
Roles give access to certain parts of your Drupal site. Depending on what your role is within the site, you can access certain features of the site.

The roles Drupal sets up are Anonymous and Authenticated User. Everyone who visits a Drupal site is one of these two roles.

Anonymous
This is anyone who visits your site and who is not logged in as a user. By default, anonymous users can view your content. That's really about all they can do by default.

Authenticated User
This is anyone who is logged in... including you, the administrator. If they are logged in, they are and Authenticated User. They have more access to your site by default, including posting comments.

Drupal has a great Access Control feature that allows you to change the access privileges of these roles, but even better, you can create new roles.

Maybe you want to have an Writer role. This role would allow users who are logged into your Drupal site and are marked as a writer to write articles for your site. They can also edit there own articles at anytime. And last, maybe you don't want these article published until they are approved by an editor.

Now we need to add the Editor role. This role allows an editor to make changes to any article, not just the ones that they have written. This role also can approve articles for publishing on your Drupal site.

Once you create a new role and assign access to them, you need to assign users to these new roles. This is very easy. Just find the user you want to change or add a role to in Users under User Management. Click Edit and you will now see some checkboxes for all the roles you have created. Click the role(s) you want to assign the user to and hit submit. That user now has a new role or roles, as users can have multiple roles!

One thing to remember as you add modules in the future is that each module will more than likely have access privileges for dofferent roles. This means that you can set access to that modules features depending on what role a user is assigned to. I have added modules many times and at first they do not seem to work. It is all because I forgot to give certain roles access to that module.

As you can see, roles can be pretty powerful in a work flow. If you have a Drupal site or are looking at creating one, make sure you check out the roles feature.