Posted by scotty23 on March 25, 2013 at 9:09pm
Looking for any advice from any large city government drupal site admins that have figured out a good way to set user permissions in a way that is most effective. Do you have a smaller, nimble group of power users who update content and are good writers, but a much larger group of contributors who can write and submit but can't approve? Trying to figure this out as we move our city site to Drupal over the next year or so. thx.
Scott
Comments
We're using three roles -
We're using three roles - author, publisher and comms (plus administrator, of course). Then we have Workbench, Workbench Access and Workbench Moderation.
Content has three states: draft, needs moderation and published. Authors can only create or edit content and send it to their publisher in the 'needs moderation' state. Publishers can create content and also put it live. Authors and publishers have permissions to edit and create only in part of the site. Comms can edit, create and moderate anywhere.
We're starting with probably around 400 authors (too many!). Aiming for one publisher in each service area (this is a new role for us). Then a small Comms team. The aim was to take away from Comms the pressure of making all content live.
So, all in all, pretty much exactly what you described.
We also use multiple roles
For background purposes, the DC.Gov portal consists of over 100 District websites, mostly agency websites. Of that total about 70 are Drupal sites (we are migrating the rest to Drupal this year).
Content is published either by agency users or by our web team here at OCTO, depending on the capabilities of the agency or office.
In the case of agencies that publish their own content, we have two roles, content authors who can create content and content editors, who can publish content. Our team has editor permissions but the role is configured so that editors on our team can publish content for any agency, whereas the agency content editors can only publish content for their site.
We haven't done a recent count on authors but I agree that it is probabaly too many. Some agencies go overboard adding content authors. We try to police only allowing a few content editors per agency who can actually publish. One is too few in case that person goes on leave. We try for 2-3 per agency.
Very helpful...
thanks for responding! I'll check out the site. We are moving from an old version of Microsoft CMS to Drupal by this time next year. We are: www.louisvilleky.gov
thx,
Scott
Very helpful...
Can you share with me what site you are working on? We are the Louisville Metro Government, moving from Microsoft CMS (old) to Drupal by this time next year. www.louisvilleky.gov
thx,
Scott
DC.Gov Migration
Hi Scott,
DC.Gov is at www.dc.gov. It is the portal for the District government. We have to migrate approximately 35 more sites this fiscal year from OpenText to Drupal.
We are currently working on about 20 of those 35 sites. For example, www.dpw.dc.gov and www.dslbd.dc.gov will move from our OpenText system this Friday to Drupal (hopefully). An example of our Drupal sites would be www.ddoe.dc.gov.
We will move our home page (www.dc.gov) sometime this summer. The plan is to incorporate responsive design into the page.
Hope that helps.
Michael
dc sites
ok, so it looks like you had a design you liked in the old site and you mostly kept it as you moved to drupal. that makes it a lot easier.
DC.Gov Migration
Hi Scott,
Actually, while similar on the face of it, we made a number of changes, including moving from an accordian style navigation on the left hand side of the home page to a more familiar horizontal navigation at the top. Reduces the number of clicks to start with.
We also enlarged and moved up the rotator to better feature content. We reduced the number of icons for content as we think it proved too confusing to some. We also think the 3 content blocks in the center (used by a number of state and local agencies) gives us better promotion of content.
Other things as well but enough change that agencies are much happier with this design than the original new design. However, to see where we are coming from, check out one of our last legacy sites at http://otr.cfo.dc.gov/otr/site/default.asp. This will be replaced right after the tax filing season.
Wonderful to hear
That's great to hear Scott. I hope to see you at the National Association of Gov Web Professionals meeting in Louisville this September. There are a bunch of local government Drupalistas attending, should be a good chance to talk.
Carolyn
chicagomom on Twitter and d.o.
Menus
Michael,
I live in a small town and we are interested in upgrading our website to Drupal. We would like to define the top level structure for the website, but delegate each subsection. For example, we might want to have "police", "fire" and "DPW" defined on the home page and have a dedicated police menu, dedicated fire menu and dedicated DPW menu. We would only like the content creator / editor / publisher for the police department to make changes or additions to the police section including the police menu; but be precluded from creating or editing another content or menus. The part I seem to have the most difficulty with is limiting who can edit specific menus. Have you been able to solve this?
If I "mouse" over "services" (in http://dc.gov/DC/), I see 9 choices and if i mouse over "education" I see 8 choices. Are "services" and "education" unique menus? Can you set things up so someone can edit the "services" menu but be precluded from editing the "education" menu?
Thank you.
Dwight
Content Control
Hi Dwight,
Heh. Well, please don't use the DC.Gov home page as your example. That is an OpenText page, not Drupal. And it is in serious need of redesign! You can look at www.ddoe.dc.gov as an example of how we set up an agency page.
The way we normally limit publication of content it is by content type. So, for example, some agencies have the ability to post press releases on their site but we control the publication of the rest of their content.
I'll have to check and see if we also control content publication by section. I'll get back to you.
Michael
Content Publishing
Hi Dwight,
My developers say it can be done. "Organic groups" is the Drupal module best suited to address this issue. http://drupal.org/project/og
Michael