Multi-Departmental Authoring in Drupal

Drupal provides immense flexibility and features. However, often its permissions implement an all or nothing model which makes a challenging job of fine-grained, role-based and content-specific access control. This presentation offers a solution to a common request on the D.O. forums: how to authorize multiple groups of authors to control subsections of a multi-departmental site. This presentation illustrates a Drupal 6 case study in which an intranet portal serving 5000 employees for a local DFW media company required support for authoring content across its 14 departments. Authors of the same department can edit, review, and publish the same subset of content. Those belonging to another department share authoring responsibilities of their subset of content, but no author can overstep content in a different department. Attendees will learn how to accomplish this capability by leveraging some key Drupal modules, and time permitting, discuss some other sophisticated solutions in this case study.