People have asked about who will see the proposed D7UX Admin header. I wanted to take a moment to talk about that and about Drupal default ‘roles’ and get your thoughts.

For those who aren’t familiar with Drupal here’s a quick overview that I copied from a Drupal 6 installation:

Roles allow you to fine tune the security and administration of Drupal. A role defines a group of users that have certain privileges as defined in user permissions. Examples of roles include: anonymous user, authenticated user, moderator, administrator and so on. ….

By default, Drupal comes with two user roles:

* Anonymous user: this role is used for users that don’t have a user account or that are not authenticated.
* Authenticated user: this role is automatically granted to all logged in users.

Clearly, to begin with, we’d be proposing that the Admin header is shown only authenticated users – that’s obvious enough!

I’d now like to introduce another concept that seems natural to me and to many others that I’ve spoken to about this (although perhaps not so much to experienced Drupal users) and that is a default differentiation between ‘Member’ and ‘Admin’.

The idea being that the Member role or roles based on the Member default are for people who have ‘signed up to’ or ‘registered with’ the website (as a member) in order to participate more fully either by creating content (submitting a session idea for a conference, a discussion post to a forum, that kind of thing). The Admin role and roles based on the Admin default are for users who have a closer association with the website – the website ‘owners’ or ‘managers’, the people to whom we’re happy to show the ‘underwear’ of the website. Admins would see the Admin Header but Members would see their tools and admin menu in the page context.

Now, of course there are many, many variations on roles that need to be created and sometimes the differentiation between whether or not a role should be a ‘member’ or an ‘admin’ is not clear. I think there is an inherent guide in the name ‘member’ that should be helpful – a member has a particular kind of relationship to a site and there are kinds of content and functionality that is less appropriate to a ‘member’ and more appropriate to an ‘admin’. There is sufficient flexibility in the system that means you can make a call whichever way you think is appropriate to your particular scenario, and to change your mind later if you like!

This is not dramatically different to the way that many Drupal sites work already and almost all of the infrastructure required already exists and just needs a little spit and polish. No architectural changes are required to achieve this – it is really a tiny and superficial, but from a user experience perspective I think this will make a significant difference in helping people understand Drupal roles and how to best implement them.

What do you think? Any questions?