Investigation: Create user authentication using Drupal user manager

[zar-wtag]

Background

Our Stackoverflow clone will need different kind of roles and permissions. At the moment we don't know exactly what Stackoverflow has and how we could implement that.

Goal

Investigate what kind of roles and permissions Stackoverflow uses and investigate how we could implement it in our project.

Acceptance

• There is a report which lists the role and permission related requirements for our project
• There are one or more technical suggestions on how to implement it

[luxflux]

Report

What does StackOverflow have?

StackOverflow uses a tier based permission model. See this page for the different tiers and permissions.

How can we replicate it using Drupal?

Having roles and different permissions for them is a basic Drupal thing. The one thing not available is the automatic switch between the roles.

Roles & Permissions

This is based on the following documentations:

• https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/understanding-drupal/users-permissions-and-roles
• https://www.drupal.org/node/120614

Roles

I'd keep things a bit simpler and only work with 5 roles:

• Anonymous (should already be there)
  • Read Questions and Comments
• User
  • Create Questions
  • Create Answers
• Commentator
  • Create Comments to Questions and Answers
• Moderator
  • Remove Questions, Answers and Comments
• Administrator (should already be there)

Permissions

Permissions can be configured at /admin/people/permissions.

Role: User

• Question: Create New Content
• Answer: Create New Content

Role: Commentator

• Don't enable the ones from User, we'll assign multiple roles to the user
• Comment -> Post new comments
  • This assumes we use the comment module

Role: Moderator

• Don't enable the ones from User and Commentator, we'll assign multiple roles to the user
• Question: Delete Any Content
• Answer: Delete Any Content
• Comment -> Administer comments and comment settings
  • This assumes we use the comment module

Automatic Promotion

To implement the automatic promotion, we'll have to create a module with a hook. See this example module to get started.

To keep things simple (in a first version at least), I'd suggest to automatically promote users based on their actions. For example:

• After creating 1 Question and 5 Answers: Promote to Comentator
• After creating 10 comments: Promote to Moderator

Drupal has the hook hook_entity_insert or hook_ENTITY_TYPE_insert which we can use to check if a user should be promoted.

Inside the hook, the following things should happen:

• Depending on the current role of the user: Get the current count of Questions and Answers or Comments
• If thresholds have been reached, promote the user using $user->addRole()