Newsroom Permissions

[rgcarr]

Would it be possible to enforce some control over limiting access to Newsrooms for specific users, to prevent some News Editors posting into the wrong Newsroom?

I was thinking that such a feature would need:

• 0..* Entity Reference field in the user profile which lists Newsrooms that the user can edit and post articles into (if User has 'News editor' role). 0/NULL references equates to access to all (current default behaviour)
• Override/alter localgov_news_field_widget_multivalue_form_alter() to alter the options available in the edit form.
• Permit edit/workflow access only for News articles that reference the user's Newsroom whitelist [and has News Editor role]. This isn't as high a priority, but would be useful

[rgcarr]

Pull request at https://github.com/rgcarr/localgov_news/pull/1

[finnlewis]

Thanks @rgcarr

At this stage it looks like the pull request on your fork relates to your custom setup.

To bring this into LocalGov Drupal's localgov_news we'd need to set the field to make sure it is all internally consistent, look at the permissions, add some tests etc.

Also this would be worth discussing with other users / councils to confirm a shared need for this.

@andybroomfield had something similar on directories, and is interested in having a feature like this, although might be looking a workbench to implement.

@Adnan-cds (Croydon) do not use localgov_news (yet).

@markconroy does not have any sites that need this at present.

[finnlewis]

Also adding this to 'Product Backlog [BAU]' project for review.

[rgcarr]

It needs a lot more work, but I just wanted to make the proposal because it's one of many problems I see with Newsrooms (facets and search are next on list)

Pieces I need to work on:

• Creating a field to add to the user profile - but wasn't sure if this was best approach
• Look at permissions for News Editor role

[rgcarr]

@finnlewis - are these issues best discussed at Product or Tech meetings? I see them advertised on Slack, but not sure what intended scope and audience is

[willguv]

Hi @rgcarr happy to pick this back up and discuss from a product/ content designer point of view

[rgcarr]

I don't have the resource at the moment to do much work on this area. The concept of Newsrooms and News articles is good, but requires a greater fidelity of permissions (akin to [organic] Groups) for multiple newsrooms in LGD to work well.

The local authority I was working with 2022-23 was interested in having a public-facing newsroom (as most councils do), plus having at least one internal-focussed (but publicly accessible) newsroom for more corporate announcements. In this particular use case, it would have been potentially disastrous to offer the corporate newsroom editors access to post articles in the public newsroom => the main news feed.

The budget was tight for Argyll & Bute, so I didn't really have the chance to develop my initial (clumsy) proposal - as outlined in the PR at the top of this issue - into something more robust, so the idea was binned.

[andybroomfield]

The new permissions module in 10.3 / 11 looks interesting and could be exactly what we are looking for.

https://tech.sparkfabrik.com/en/blog/drupal-access-policy-demystified/