This chapter provided a good grounding in the basics of controlling access to your site's content. Drupal comes with a large number of facilities and options to ensure proper maintenance of the site by retaining overall control with the administrative user, as well as delegating important jobs to trusted users via the use of roles.
We looked at how to go about planning an access policy. This is not only an important requirement, in terms of making sure the site runs smoothly, but also helps to solidify how the site will eventually work by forcing you to consider many eventualities. A tour of the fundamental aspects of access control in Drupal saw us discussing roles, permissions, and users, and learning how to plan and implement an access policy based on the requirements of the site.
Access rules were then introduced as a further way of controlling who gets into the site, with a discussion on how to use the wildcard characters effectively. Planning, and above all, testing, will help...