Improvements to permissions system

[pnicolai]

It would be nice to have more granular permissions rules. For example: I set the permissions of a toplevel page to private, and allow fred, sally & joan to view/edit it. I check the box to apply changes to child pages. Then I add a child page that I want fred, sally, joan & mark (the outside client) to be able to view. It would be nice if I could just add a rule to allow mark to view that page and have the parent page's permissions propagate down, so I don't have to enter all their names over again (& possibly forget one of them). Likewise, maybe another child page should only be viewable by fred & sally. It would be nice to be able to just add a 'deny' rule for joan to that page.

In any case, the title of a page should only ever appear in the left-column nav tree if the logged-in user has permission to view that page. The title of a page is part of that page, so it should be subject to the page's access rules.

[royk]

When you create a new page it inherits the permissions for the parent, so in your case, when you create a new page, F, S, and J would all get permissions to the new page; you would only need to add M.

[pnicolai]

I see... after thinking about this more, I'm realizing that this could get confusing and it kind of means once a parent page is restricted, and if some of the child pages' permissions will vary, you pretty much have to check the permissions for every descendent page to make sure you have given the right people access to it. As far as I can tell, there's no way to tell which page's permissions you are inheriting from different points in the hierarchy. It seems like it would be easy to forget to check the restrictions on a page you've created and make a mistake.

[SteveB]

You are always inheriting the permissions of your most immediate parent.

Also, the permissioning system is pretty smart, when you remove someone from a parent page and apply the changes to all child pages, only the 'change' is propagated and applied. Meaning, it won't stump out any special permissions you might have given. This works for both removing and adding individuals.

Finally, the question about showing the page title vs. hiding is a much broader issue. I've covered this before and you can read up on it by doing a search.