A Guide to Drupal eCommerce and Site Development

Welcome to the third section of the tutorial on configuring your Drupal site with restricted access permissions. The first section of this tutorial explains Drupal's permissions and user roles. The second section walks through creating user roles and setting their permissions. In this section, installing and configuring the Content Access module.

Installing & Configuring The Content Access Module
First, navigate your web browser to this address and download the Content Access module:

http://drupal.org/project/content_access

I won’t go into how to install a Drupal module here. That is a basic Drupal skill that you should have, and it is documented in many, many places on the web. So, once the module is downloaded, copy it to your sites/all/modules directory, and activate it in the normal manner of any good Drupal module.

The Content Access module extends the permissions capabilities of Drupal so you can configure permissions on a content type basis, as well as on a per node basis. It is quite a useful module, and you can read more about the added features in the Drupal 6 version here: http://more.zites.net/content_access_for_drupal_6.

After you’ve activated the Content Access module, the top of the admin/build/modules page will display a message to you:

This site message appears just after enabling the Content Access module

Clicking the ‘this page’ link takes you to a page that looks like this:

A special version of the Post settings page only offering to rebuild permissions

Click the ‘Rebuild permissions’ button to finalize the activation of the Content Access module. Note that the ‘breadcrumb’ shown in the above image tells you this page is the Post settings configuration page. Actually, it is a special form of that page only for rebuilding permissions, as you will see when we return to this page later, the complete page has more settings than what is shown above.

If you have any questions or suggestions for how I can improve the above, please write a comment. Constructive comments will be followed as much as possible. Otherwise, please visit the last section of this tutorial:
Creating a Privileged Access Content Type.