Create User Roles

[cmbirk]

Currently the permissions are based on 2 user roles: normal users and admin users. The admin users are able to access everything in the dashboard.

We need a role system to be able to specify granular privileges. This has been started already with the roles table and the role_user pivot table.

Right now each role entry has a varchar column - permissions. Originally I was picturing this working similar to the way Wordpress does it - a serialized array of permissions, but I'm rethinking that strategy.

The alternative is removing the permissions column, and creating a permissions table and a permission_role pivot table. We can then attach as many permissions to a role as is necessary. The Eloquent ORM even has a way for the user to access their permissions 'through' the user role: http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#has-many-through . This would allow much more granularity in roles, and even allow the superadmins to create roles themselves - attaching the permissions to the role through the dashboard. I'm leaning much more strongly in this direction.

@billhunt and @coogle could I get some other opinions on this issue?

[cmbirk]

This system would replace the current user_level column in the users table.

[krusynth]

I'm all for role-based permissions, but I'd check to see if I could find a plugin to handle this first - it looks like there are a few already available, I'm just not sure what we'd need.

[cmbirk]

Excellent idea. I'll take a look. Thanks @krues8dr

[cmbirk]

I think we can do this with the entrust plugin:

http://registry.autopergamene.eu/package/zizaco-entrust https://github.com/Zizaco/entrust

[coogle]

It looks interesting and right up our alley. Without objections I'll run with this plugin then.

John

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 4:51 PM, Chris Birk notifications@github.com wrote:

I think we can do this with the entrust plugin: http://registry.autopergamene.eu/package/zizaco-entrust

https://github.com/Zizaco/entrust

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/opengovfoundation/madison/issues/171#issuecomment-38966612

[coogle]

I just pushed the issue171 branch, which is an initial implementation of the Entrust module. See my commit log in this branch for a complete list, but basically

• Implements RBAC
  • Implements three permissions for admins 'settings', 'verify users', and 'manage documents'
  • Created some database seeds to create a default user and make them an admin
  • Cleaned up the code a bit

[cmbirk]

@coogle I'm going to keep these open until they're actually merged into master.