Understanding DotNetNuke roles and role groups

We just discussed how to add a user to your site. But are all users created equal? To understand how users are allowed to interact with the portal, we will need to take a look at what a role is and how it factors into the portal. There are plenty of real-world examples of roles we can look at. A police station, for example, can have sergeants, patrol cops, and detectives, and with each position come different responsibilities and privileges. In a police station, there are multiple people filling those positions (roles) with each of those belonging to the same position (role) sharing the same set of responsibilities and privileges.

Roles in our portal work the same way. Roles are set up to divide the responsibilities needed to run your portal, as well as to provide different content to different groups of users of your portal.

We want our portal to be easy for the administrators to manage. To do this, we will need to settle on the different user roles needed for our site. To determine this, we first need to decide on the different types of users who will access the portal. We will detail these user types in the following list:

• Administrator: The administrators will have very high security. They will be able to modify, delete, or move anything on the site. They will be able to add and delete users and control all security settings. (This role comes built-in with DotNetNuke.) The default administrator account is created during the creation of the portal.
• Home Page Admin: The home page admins will have the ability to modify only the information on the home page. They will be responsible for changing what users see when they first access your site. (We will be adding this role.)
• Forum Admin: The forum moderators will have the ability to monitor and modify posts in your forum. They will have the ability to approve or disapprove messages posted. (We will be adding this role.)
• Registered User: The registered users will be able to post messages in the forum and be able to access sections of the site set aside for registered users only. (This role comes built into DotNetNuke; however, we would need to provide the proper permissions to this role to perform the mentioned tasks.)
• Unauthenticated User: The unauthenticated user is the most basic of all the user types. Any person browsing your site will fall under this category, until they have successfully logged in to the site. This user type will be able to browse certain sections of your portal, but will be restricted from posting in the forum and will not be allowed in the Registered Users Only section. (This role comes built into DotNetNuke; however, we would need to provide the proper permissions to this role to perform the mentioned tasks.)

Once you formulate the different user roles that will access the site, you will need to re strict users’ access. For example, we only want the Home Page Admin to be able to edit items on the home page. To accomplish this, DotNetNuke uses role-based security. Role-based security allows you to give access to portions of your website based on what role the user belongs to. User-based security is also available per page or content section of the portal. However, the benefit of using a role-based security method is that you only have to define the access privileges for a role once. Then you just need to add users to that role and they will possess the privileges that the role defines. The following diagram gives you an idea of how this works:

Looking at the diagram, we notice two things:

• Users can be assigned to more than one role
• More than one user can be assigned to a single role

This gives us great flexibility when deciding on the authorization that users will possess in our portal.

To create the roles we have detailed, sign in with an administrator account, and select ADMIN | Security Roles on the main menu or click the Roles link in the Common Tasks section of the control panel. This is available on the top of every DNN page for authorized users. You might need to click the double down arrows on the top-right of the page to maximize the panel. The Security Roles page appears as shown in the following screenshot:

Notice that DotNetNuke comes with three roles already built into the system: the Administrators role (which we have been using), the Registered Users role, and the Subscribers role. Before we jump right into creating the role, let us first discuss the role group feature of DotNetNuke, as we will be using this feature when we create our roles.

A role group is a collection of roles used, mainly, in large sites with a large number of roles, as a way of managing the roles more effectively. For the site we are building, the benefit of using role groups will be minimal. However, in order to demonstrate how to use them, we will create one for our administrative roles.

While on the Security Roles page, click the Add New Role Group link located below the list of roles. This will present us with the Edit Role Group page containing two form fields.

Once these fields are filled out, click the Update link at the bottom of this page. A Filer By Role Group drop-down list should now be displayed above the list of roles on the Security Roles page. If you select the Administrative Roles group that we just created, two noticeable things happen on this page. Firstly, the list of roles become empty as no roles are currently assigned to this role group. Secondly, an edit (pencil) icon and a delete (red cross X) icon now appear next to the drop-down list. These icons can be used to update or remove any custom role groups that exist on the site. These red ‘X’ icons are standard icons used throughout DotNetNuke to represent the ability to delete/remove items.

Now that we have created our role group, we want to create the role for Home Page Admin. To do this, you again have two choices. Either select Add New Role from the dropdown in the upper left, or click on the Add New Role link. This will bring up the Edit Security Roles page, as shown in the next screenshot. We will use this page to create the Home Page Admin role that we need.

The Basic Settings shown in the screenshot are as follows:

• Role Name: Make the name of your role short, but descriptive. The name should attempt to convey its purpose.
• Description: Here you may detail the responsibilities of the role.
• Role Group: Set this field to the Administrative Roles group that we created earlier.
• Public Role: Checking this will give registered users of your site the ability to sign up for this role themselves. We will be creating a Newsletter role and will demonstrate how this works when it is created.
• Auto Assignment: If this is checked, users will automatically be assigned to this role as soon as they register for your portal.

CAUTION
Do not check the Public Role and Auto Assignment checkboxes, unless you are sure. Checking these options would allow all users of the site to become members of the associated role, which would grant them the privileges assigned to the role.

As we want to decide who will be able to modify our home page, we will leave both of these unchecked. To save the settings, click on the Update link.

The Advanced Settings section allows you to set up a fee for certain security roles. We will not be configuring any of these settings for this particular exercise. However, we will briefly discuss how these settings can be used in Assigning security roles to users section.

Now to complete the roles that we will require for Coffee Connections, we will add two more security roles

The first role will be called Newsletter. We will be using this role to allow users to sign up for the newsletter we will be hosting at the Coffee Connections site. Set up the security role with the following information:

• Role Name: Newsletter
• Description: Allows users to register for the Coffee Connections Newsletter
• Role Group: Leave this as the default < Global Roles > as it is not going to be used to grant administrative rights to its members
• Public Role: Yes (checked)
• Auto Assignment: No (unchecked)

Click on the Update link to save this role.

The second role will be called Forum Admin. We will be using this role to administer the forums at the Coffee Connections site. Set up the security role with the following information:

• Role Name: Forum Admin
• Description: Allows user to administer Coffee Connections Forum
• Role Group: Administrative Roles
• Public Role: No (unchecked)
• Auto Assignment: No (unchecked)