Help with hiding things in the Manager

I’m struggling a little to get my head round a few things, and apologies for multiple questions in one topic:

1. Is there more of a plain English version of what the permissions in Access Policies actually mean? eg struggling to understand whether it matters if I remove ’view_context’, when I have given someone ’view’, in a specific context - does the seemingly more specific permission matter or not? Another example - ’Unpublish’ and ’Unpublish document’ both have the same description - are they both required?

2. The ’definitive’ list of permissions that an Access Policy has still leaves things visible that I want to remove (eg the Components tab on the menu) - how do I go about this?

3. Lastly - related, but I suspect the answer is in Form Customisation - how would I remove ’Configuration Check’ or ’Modx News’ from appearing when people log in to the manager? The only way I can find to do it (remove ’home’ permission) gives them an ’unathorised’ message. Which may in turn be a way of asking ’how do I find out the name of the panel I want to hide’ in an action under Form Customisation?

I’ve read the RTFM explanations on Access Policies, and I just don’t get it, I’m afraid. I want to create editor users, who can upload, update and delete resources, and not deal with any other crapola. But I can’t easily understand how to remove the crapola from their lives. Any pointers appreciated.

Ok - so addressing #3

Hiding or displaying different things on the homepage - I can see two ways of doing this - neither of which seem particularly sensible (from an upgrade point of view):

3.1 Add a new permission to the access_permissions table (something like ’Home_alternate’)
3.2 Edit manager/controllers/default/welcome.php to add an extra check for this new permission and change the final line to fetch an alternate welcome-alt.tpl

(There are two problems here - upgrading and making sure that Home and Home_alt aren’t set together)

or
3.1a Edit line8 of manager/controllers/default/welcome.php to change the behaviour returned if you don’t have ’Home’ permission

(with the same problem for upgrading)

Any thoughts?

3.1b Or I could edit welcome.tpl as the least work to re-do....

Quote from: odeclas at Oct 26, 2010, 02:52 PM

1. Is there more of a plain English version of what the permissions in Access Policies actually mean? eg struggling to understand whether it matters if I remove ’view_context’, when I have given someone ’view’, in a specific context - does the seemingly more specific permission matter or not? Another example - ’Unpublish’ and ’Unpublish document’ both have the same description - are they both required?

They’re actually different Permissions - ’view’ is more applied directly to Objects (particularly when used in a Resource ACL), where view_document applies to *all* documents. There’s some confusion with this in the 2.0.4 UI; a lot of this is being cleared up in 2.0.5.

2. The ’definitive’ list of permissions that an Access Policy has still leaves things visible that I want to remove (eg the Components tab on the menu) - how do I go about this?

Just set the Permission of the ’components’ menu item to a Permission you know a User doesn’t have, or add a custom permission. We’re addressing this in 2.0.5 by adding a "components" Permission to the Components menu.

3. Lastly - related, but I suspect the answer is in Form Customisation - how would I remove ’Configuration Check’ or ’Modx News’ from appearing when people log in to the manager? The only way I can find to do it (remove ’home’ permission) gives them an ’unathorised’ message. Which may in turn be a way of asking ’how do I find out the name of the panel I want to hide’ in an action under Form Customisation?

Currently you can’t edit the manager dashboard (although you can hide the feeds in System Settings, search for "feed"). This is one of the top priority features for 2.1.