What are "access levels?"
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A Joomla website has a number of “access levels” for users. An understanding of these access levels is helpful as you build your site, especially if you want others to contribute to your site or if you wish to restrict access to certain parts of your site or certain features.
Now, if you are the only one that will be working on your site, then you don’t really need to know much about access levels. But, it’s still good to know these things.
Joomla comes with 8 pre-defined access levels. Each level has certain privileges. Let’s take a look at these.
Public Front-end
| ---- Registered
| -------- Author
| ------------- Editor
| ------------------- Publisher
Administrator Back-end
| ------- Manager
| ------------- Administrator
| ------------------- Super Administrator
Front End Access
First of all there are four access levels that work in the Joomla “front end,” or the “public” part of your website. They are as follows:
| Registered | These Users are able to login to the Front-end web site. Additional
information (sections and pages) may be available to a user once logged
in. In general, access provided to a parent group (like Registered) is
inherited by the child groups (like Author) unless specifically denied
by the Super Administrator. |
| Author |
These Users are given access to submit new content and edit their own content items/pages by logging into the Front-end. |
| Editor |
These Users are given access to submit and edit any content by logging into the Front-end. |
| Publisher |
These Users are given access to submit, edit and publish any content by logging into the Front-end. |
Administrator Level Access
Second, there are three access levels that are also given access to the Joomla administrator control panel (often called the “back end” of your site).
| Manager | This group allows access to content creation and other system information. |
| Administrator | This group allows access to most administration functions. |
| Super-Administrator | This group allows access to all administration functions. |
Limitations of the Joomla Access Control System
While this system of access is fine for many Joomla sites, there may be times where you want to control access a bit differently. For example, if you give a user “publisher” access, they have that authority for all areas of content, not just some areas.
Let’s say you have a website for a school, and different classes and clubs and groups have their own section of the site. If you give someone publisher status, that status will extend across all classes and groups on the website. You can’t give someone publisher status for the sports teams only and not for the music department.
If you need that type of control, there are some Joomla extensions that you can add to your site that will allow you to make very precise access groups.
One of the most popular is JACL Plus. You can find it listed on the Joomla Extensions directory here.