I recently received an email asking me how to bring a Drupal site back online after taking it offline for site maintenance. For those of you who haven't done this yet you can take your site offline (and put it back online) by going to /admin/settings/site-maintenance. If you take your site offline for maintenance, then log out of the site you will get the "Site off-line message" indicated in your settings. To get back into your site all you need to do is go to /user/login. There you will be presented with the login form that you can complete in order to gain entry to your site.

It's important to understand that unless you specifically set the permission for "administer site configuration" under the system module then only user #1 can manage the maintenance status of the site. If you do want to grant this access to another user then you will also probably want to grant access to "access administration pages" as well. A screenshot of the appropriate section of the user permissions page (/admin/user/permissions) is included below.

I received another question recently that relates to roles and permissions as well. A reader asked how they could eliminate all of the extra fields below the node body when editing a node. An example of these "extra fields" is shown below.

This is what the node submission form looks like with the vertical tabs module installed. Vertical tabs is highly recommended for Drupal 6 sites. In Drupal 7 this is a core module so you'll have it out of the box. What about the fields though? Users should not see those "extra fields" as long as they don't have the "administer nodes" permission.

If you're concerned about what your users who can contribute content to your site are seeing I recommend that you do two things. First, check your permissions in the Node Module section of the User Permissions page to see what the appropriate role can and cannot do. Second, create a user for yourself with a role equal to that of your contributors. This way you can login with the contributor role and see what they see. The Masquerade module looks like something that would assist with switching on the fly so you don't have to log out and log back in. You can also use separate browsers or use something featured in the Google Chrome web browser called an incognito window.

At this point I think it's worth noting just how important roles are on your Drupal site. They are definitely worth thinking about. Out of the box there are two user roles which are anonymous and authenticated. Those roles are in addition to the everything (or "god") role that is granted to user #1 on the site. If you're going to have a site where people cannot sign up for accounts (configure that at /admin/user/settings) then you won't have to spend too much time on it. Your user setting options are pictured below.

If you are going to allow people to sign up for accounts then think hard about the access they will have. If you're in a situation where there will be other administrators or site editors then it is likely that you will want to set up additional roles (do this at /admin/user/roles) to give those users special permissions. For example, if you have people who are editing content or perhaps moderating comments then you would create a separate role, assign the appropriate permissions to the role then assign the role to that user. Roles can be assigned manually in the account page of a user as shown in the picture below.

If you want roles to be assigned automatically I suggest that you investigate the Auto Assign Role module. I haven't used it yet but I have it on my list of modules to try for another site that I am working on.

If you have any ideas, tips or tricks related to user roles I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

Copyright 2010, Robert Safuto, Some Rights Reserved. Please visit Learn By The Drop to comment, subscribe or explore additional content not available via the RSS Feed.

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