Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Using Security to Simplify the User Experience

In general, Sitecore recommends that business users and power users access WebEdit mode to the greatest degree possible. For a variety of reasons, however, this may not always be possible. Administrators, for example, may prefer sorting from within the Content Editor rather than in WebEdit mode. Additionally, content authors may need to edit content items for which no content markers have been created (such as look-up values, for example).

In these cases it may be worthwhile to use security permissions to limit what appears in the content tree (see also “Hiding and Protecting Items,” the subject of a future blog posting). One way to accomplish this is to deny read access to branches of the content tree for particular users. In a multi-site scenario, this may mean denying read permissions to Site A for the content authors of Site B. The end result would be that when a Site B author logs in to the Content Editor, they do not see Site A at all. This may reduce confusion and clutter in the content tree for the content author.

The weakness of this approach is that content items for which a user does not have read access do not appear in the rich text editor when a user is creating a Sitecore link. In other words, a user cannot create a managed link to a content item for which the user does not have read permissions. This applies to lookup, multilist, tree, treelist and checklist fields as well.

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