Up and Running with Joomla, 2nd Edition

Groups and Permissions

Like any CMS, a large part of the value Joomla brings to a person developing and running a website is the ability to control the types of users that author, edit, manage, administrator, or view the content. At its core, Joomla breaks this down into Guest, Public Front-end, and Public Back-end high-level groups. Guests represent anyone who is not logged in, whether registered or not, while the Public Front-end and Public Back-end groups have further segmentation and meaning. Let's take a look at those.

Public Front-end

The Public Front-end refers to the main Joomla site that all users, even non-registered ones, access. Permissions around the Public Front-end, on the other hand, refer to users with some level of registration. When these users are logged in, they have access to content, functions, modules, or other aspects of the CMS that non-logged-in users do not have access to. Public Front-end groups are as follows:

• Registered: these users have completed the registration process and, upon successful login, can of course view all content classified with an Access Level Public plus content with a level of Registered. They can also perform, by default, functions such as configuring their user profile and submitting web links (more on that later).

• Author: inherit permissions present for Registered with the added benefit of being able to create new content.

• Editor: inherit permissions present for Author with the added benefit of being able to review and edit any published ...