I need a CMS which will let me specify which categories a particular registered user can view.

February 9, 2005 12:40 PM

I need a CMS which will let me specify which categories a particular registered user can view - e.g., A can view categories 1, 3, and 4; B can view 2 and 4; C can view 1, 2 and 5; and D can only view 5.

Does such a thing exist? Don't mind paying if that's what it takes.
posted by humuhumu to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Drupal. I think you'll need the "Taxonomy Access Control" add-on module ("taxonomy" is Drupal-speak for categories, except it covers the entire site structure).

Note that Drupal already contains pretty fine-grained role-based access controls, but not exactly what you want. Also note that even with Taxonomy Access Control, you grant permissions to roles, not individual users. There's no reason you can't create a role just for one user, but it could get cumbersome.
posted by adamrice at 1:10 PM on February 9, 2005

Most, if not all professional grade CMS's can do that. What platform were you thinking about?
posted by jsavimbi at 1:11 PM on February 9, 2005

Response by poster: adamrice, that sounds like a good possibility. There aren't going to be an enormous amount of users, so defining permissions by role shouldn't be a hardship. Will d/l and check it out.

jsavimbi, it will be running on apache. I have mysql / php / perl / etc etc etc all available.
posted by humuhumu at 1:28 PM on February 9, 2005

How about MyDMS? It's easy to install and customize, I had it up and running on a Linux system in an hour or so. Looks like it runs on Windows 2000, too.
posted by jenh at 4:32 PM on February 9, 2005

Scoop can do that too. It can be sort of hard to install, though. You can restrict access to sections on the site to users depending on what group you put them in, which sounds like what you want.

Disclaimer: I do coding for Scoop and all, but I'm hardly the only Scoop developer on Metafilter.
posted by Captain_Tenille at 5:19 PM on February 9, 2005

EZ Publish CMS, a personal fave of mine, implements role-based permissions that will do what you need.
posted by killdevil at 9:27 PM on February 9, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks all. I went with Drupal and after about an hour or so had it up and running and doing exactly what was needed. There's a few things I need to iron out - it's much more of a web site builder than a blog-tool, which was what I really wanted - but the role-based permissions were key, and this has that feature exactly as I needed it. So a gold star to adamrice and chocolates to the rest of you.
posted by humuhumu at 12:13 AM on February 10, 2005

THere's plugins to do this in Movable Type, if Drupal ends up being more tool than you want.
posted by anildash at 1:07 AM on February 10, 2005

Response by poster: After playing with Drupal for a bit longer, I'm more confused than I was when I started. Did the developers deliberately intend to make it as difficult as possible? I can change user permissions, but can I work out how to display a list of categories (or whatever they're called in Drupal)? I cannot... I tried one nifty piece of php and kaboom, error messages on all pages and I can't figure out where the php I just entered actually exists to get rid of it. Ho hum...
posted by humuhumu at 2:19 PM on February 10, 2005