slate blog

We’ve made a fairly big switch with the latest version of slate. We’ve reduced the options available regarding roles. Currently we provide the ability to create roles with really granular control over what permissions can be turned off or on. Really great idea with a lot of flexibility but a) it’s a huge pain to update with new features and b) no one is really using it. So what are we going to do in v0.4.0?

We’ve decided to create three system-defined roles that can be assigned to any user. They are:

• Administrator,
• Publisher &
• Writer

We’ve taken away a little flexibility but there are some significant benefits with the new set-up:

• adding a new user is just that, finding and adding a user. once they’re added they can get to work because everyone will automatically be assigned Publisher rights.
• we currently allow only one administrator and now anyone can be assigned those rights. we will now have one “site owner” instead to act as the primary contact for a site.
• if you only want someone to edit content then Writer is the role for them.
• when we add a new big feature (e.g. Calendar) there will be no configuration on the site owner’s end it’ll just be all transparent permission-wise.

This is a big change but we feel that this will go a long way to continue making slate perfect for dead-simple content management. Here is what the users panel in the current build of slate (e.g. v0.4.0a) looks like. Note the new system-wide “delete” icon as well.